.  i  r  t  i . ; '  1 :  i  • 


I    Ijl    I     till 


A  MOTOR: 
FLIGHT 

THROUGH 
FRANCE 


EDITH  WHARTON 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


v      • 


.' 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT 
THROUGH  FRANCE 


CHAUVIGNY:    RUINS  OF  CASTLE 


A  MOTOR -FLIGHT 

THROUGH  FRANCE 

BY 
EDITH   WHARTON 

ILLUSTRATED 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

1908 


OOPTBIQHT,   1908,  BY 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
Published  October,  1908 


DCZt 


CONTENTS 
PART  I 

CHAPTER  PAOK 

I.     Boulogne  to  Amiens 1 

II.     Beauvais  and  Rouen 15 

III.  From  Rouen  to  Fontainebleau     ...  24 

IV.  The  Loire  and  the  Indre 34 

V.     Nohant  to  Clermont 48 

VI.     In  Auvergne 56 

VII.     Royat  to  Bourges 66 

PART    II 

I.     Paris  to  Poitiers 73 

II.     Poitiers  to  the  Pyrenees 95 

III.  The  Pyrenees  to  Provence      ....  117 

IV.  The  Rhone  to  the  Seine 143 

PART    III 

A  Flight  to  the  North-east    ....  172 

Lv] 


359 

ISH 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

Chauvigny :  Ruins  of  castle Frontispiece 

Facing  page 

Arras:  Hotel  deViUe 2 

Amiens :  West  front  of  the  Cathedral 6 

Amiens :  Ambulatory  of  the  Cathedral 10 

Beauvais :  West  front  of  the  Cathedral 14 

Rouen :  Rue  de  VHorloge 18 

Rouen :  The  facade  of  the  Church  of  Saint-Maclou      .     .  22 

Rouen:  Monument  of  the  Cardinals  of  Amboise  in  the 

Cathedral 26 

Le  Petit  Andely :  View  of  the  town  and  Chateau  GaiUard  30 

Orleans :  General  view  of  the  town 38 

Nohant :  Chateau  of  George  Sand 42 

Nohant :  Garden  pavilion 44 

Clermont-Ferrand :  Notre-Dame  du  Port 50 

Orcival:  The  church 62 

Moulins :  Place  de  l'Hotel-de-  Ville  and  the  Jacquemart  tower  70 

Bourges :  Apse  of  the  Cathedral 74 

Chateau  of  Maintenon 76 

Neuvy  Saint-Sepulcre :  Church  of  the  Precious  Blood  .     .  84 

Neuvy  Saint-Sepulcre :  Interior  of  the  church    ....  88 

Poitiers :  Baptistery  of  St  John 90 

[vii] 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing  page 

Poitiers :  The  Church  of  Notre-Dame-la-Grande     ...  92 

Angouleme :  Facade  of  the  Cathedral 96 

Thiers :  View  of  the  town  from  the  Pont  de  SeychaUes      .  98 

Bordeaux:  Church  of  The  Holy  Cross 100 

Betharram:  The  bridge 106 

Argeles-Gazost :  The  old  bridge 108 

Salies  de  Beam:  View  of  old  town 110 

St.  Bertrand-de-Comminges :  Pier  of  the  Four  Evangelists 

in  the  Cloister 116 

Albi:  General  view  of  the  Cathedral 118 

AIM :  Interior  of  the  Cathedral 120 

Nimes :  The  Baths  of  Diana — public  gardens    .     .     .     .  122 

Carcassonne:  The  Porte  de  VAude 124 

Saint-Remy :  The  Mausoleum 126 

St.  Maximin:  Choir  stalls  in  the  church 130 

Toulon :  The  House  of  Puget 134 

Orange:  The  Arch  of  Marius 136 

Grignan :  Gate  of  the  castle 138 

Valence:  The  Cathedral 142 

Vienne :  General  view  of  the  town 146 

Brou:  Tomb  of  Margaret  of  Austria  in  the  church  .     .     .  150 

Dijon :  Mourners  on  the  tomb  of  Jean  Sans  Peur    .     .     .  154 

Avallon :  General  view  of  the  town 158 

Vezelay :  Narthex  of  the  Church  of  the  Madeleine  .     .     .  160 

Sens:  Apse  of  the  Cathedral 168 

[  viii  ] 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing  page 

Noyon:  Hotel  de  Ville 186 

St.  Quentin;  Hotel  de  Ville 188 

Loon :  General  view  of  the  town  and  Cathedral  .     .     .     .  192 

Soissons :  Ruined  church  of  Saint-J ean-des-Vignes      .     .  196 


[k] 


A    MOTOR-FLIGHT 
THROUGH    FRANCE 

PART  I 


BOULOGNE   TO  AMIENS 

THE  motor-car  has  restored  the  romance  of 
travel. 
Freeing  us  from  all  the  compulsions  and  con- 
tacts of  the  railway,  the  bondage  to  fixed  hours 
and  the  beaten  track,  the  approach  to  each  town 
through  the  area  of  ugliness  and  desolation 
created  by  the  railway  itself,  it  has  given  us 
back  the  wonder,  the  adventure  and  the  noveltv 
which  enlivened  the  way  of  our  posting  grand- 
parents. Above  all  these  recovered  pleasures 
must  be  ranked  the  delight  of  taking  a  town  una- 
wares, stealing  on  it  by  back  ways  and  unchron- 
icled  paths,  and  surprising  in  it  some  intimate 
aspect  of  past  time,  some  silhouette  hidden  for 
half  a  century  or  more  by  the  ugly  mask  of 

[1]   ' 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

railway  embankments  and  the  iron  bulk  of  a 
huge  station.  Then  the  villages  that  we  missed 
and  yearned  for  from  the  windows  of  the  train 
— the  unseen  villages  have  been  given  back  to 
us! — and  nowhere  could  the  importance  of  the 
recovery  have  been  more  delightfully  exemplified 
than  on  a  May  afternoon  in  the  Pas-de-Calais, 
as  we  climbed  the  long  ascent  beyond  Boulogne 
on  the  road  to  Arras. 

It  is  a  delightful  country,  broken  into  wide 
waves  of  hill  and  valley,  with  hedge-rows  high 
and  leafy  enough  to  bear  comparison  with  the 
Kentish  hedges  among  which  our  motor  had 
left  us  a  day  or  two  before;  and  the  villages,  the 
frequent,  smiling,  happily-placed  villages,  will 
also  meet  successfully  the  more  serious  chal- 
lenge of  their  English  rivals — meet  it  on  other 
grounds  and  in  other  ways,  with  paved  market- 
places and  clipped  charmilles  instead  of  gorse- 
fringed  commons,  with  soaring  belfries  instead 
of  square  church  towers,  with  less  of  verdure,  but 
more,  perhaps,  of  outline — certainly  of  line. 

The  country  itself — so  green,  so  full  and 
close  in  texture,  so  pleasantly  diversified  by 
clumps   of  woodland   in   the  hollows,   and  by 

[2] 


ARRAS:     HOTEL  DE  VILLE 


BOULOGNE  TO  AMIENS 

streams  threading  the  great  fields  with  light — 
all  this,  too,  has  the  English,  or  perhaps  the 
Flemish  quality — for  the  border  is  close  by — 
with  the  added  beauty  of  reach  and  amplitude, 
the  deliberate  gradual  flow  of  level  spaces  into 
distant  slopes,  till  the  land  breaks  in  a  long  blue 
crest  against  the  seaward  horizon. 

There  was  much  beauty  of  detail,  also,  in 
the  smaller  towns  through  which  we  passed: 
some  of  them  high-perched  on  ridges  that  raked 
the  open  country,  with  old  houses  stumbling 
down  at  picturesque  angles  from  the  central 
market-place;  others  tucked  in  the  hollows, 
among  orchards  and  barns,  with  the  pleasant 
country  industries  reaching  almost  to  the  doors 
of  their  churches.  In  the  little  villages  a  deep 
delicious  thatch  overhangs  the  plastered  walls  of 
cottages  espaliered  with  pear-trees,  and  ducks 
splash  in  ponds  fringed  with  hawthorn  and 
laburnum;  and  in  the  towns  there  is  almost 
always  some  note  of  character,  of  distinction — 
the  gateway  of  a  seventeenth  century  hotel,  the 
triple  arch  of  a  church-front,  the  spring  of  an  old 
mossy  apse,  the  stucco  and  black  cross-beams  of 
an  ancient  guild-house — and  always  the  straight 

[3] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

lime-walk,  square-clipped  or  trained  en  berceau, 
with  its  sharp  green  angles  and  sharp  black 
shade  acquiring  a  value  positively  architectural 
against  the  high  lights  of  the  paved  or  gravelled 
place.  Everything  about  this  rich  juicy  land 
bathed  in  blond  light  is  characteristically  Flem- 
ish, even  to  the  slow-moving  eyes  of  the  peasants, 
the  bursting  red  cheeks  of  the  children,  the 
drowsy  grouping  of  the  cattle  in  flat  pastures; 
and  at  Hesdin  we  felt  the  architectural  nearness 
of  the  Low  Countries  in  the  presence  of  a  fine 
town-hall  of  the  late  Renaissance,  with  the 
peculiar  "movement"  of  volutes  and  sculptured 
ornament — lime-stone  against  warm  brick — that 
one  associates  with  the  civic  architecture  of 
Belgium:  a  fuller,  less  sensitive  line  than  the 
French  architect  permits  himself,  with  more 
massiveness  and  exuberance  of  detail. 

This  part  of  France,  with  its  wide  expanse  of 
agricultural  landscape,  disciplined  and  cultivated 
to  the  last  point  of  finish,  shows  how  nature  may 
be  utilized  to  the  utmost  clod  without  losing  its 
freshness  and  naturalness.  In  some  regions  of 
this  supremely  "administered"  country,  where 
space  is  more  restricted,  or  the  fortunate  acci- 

[4] 


BOULOGNE  TO  AMIENS 

dents  of  water  and  varying  levels  are  lacking,  the 
minute  excessive  culture,  the  endless  ranges  of 
potager  wall,  and  the  long  lines  of  fruit-trees 
bordering  straight  interminable  roads,  may  pro- 
duce in  the  American  traveller  a  reaction  toward 
the  unkempt,  a  momentary  feeling  that  ragged 
road-sides  and  weedy  fields  have  their  artistic 
value.  But  here  in  northern  France,  where 
agriculture  has  mated  with  poetry  instead  of 
banishing  it,  one  understands  the  higher  beauty 
of  land  developed,  humanised,  brought  into  rela- 
tion to  life  and  history,  as  compared  with  the 
raw  material  with  which  the  greater  part  of  our 
own  hemisphere  is  still  clothed.  In  France 
everything  speaks  of  long  familiar  intercourse 
between  the  earth  and  its  inhabitants ;  every  field 
has  a  name,  a  history,  a  distinct  place  of  its  own 
in  the  village  polity ;  every  blade  of  grass  is  there 
by  an  old  feudal  right  which  has  long  since  dis- 
possessed the  worthless  aboriginal  weed. 

As  we  neared  Arras  the  road  lost  its  pleasant 
windings  and  ran  straight  across  a  great  plateau, 
with  an  occasional  long  dip  and  ascent  that  never 
deflected  it  from  its  purpose,  and  the  villages 
became  rarer,  as  they  always  do  on  the  high 

[5] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

wind-swept  plains  of  France.  Arras,  however, 
was  full  of  compensations  for  the  dullness  of 
the  approach:  a  charming  old  grey  town,  with 
a  great  air  of  faded  seventeenth-century  opulence, 
in  which  one  would  have  liked  to  linger,  picking 
out  details  of  gateway  and  courtyard,  of  sculp- 
tured masks  and  wrought-iron  balconies — if  only 
a  brief  peep  into  the  hotel  had  not  so  promptly 
quenched  the  impulse  to  spend  a  night  there. 

To  Amiens  therefore  we  passed  on,  passing 
again,  toward  sunset,  into  a  more  broken  coun- 
try, with  lights  just  beginning  to  gleam  through 
the  windows  of  the  charming  duck-pond  villages, 
and  tall  black  crucifixes  rising  ghostly  at  the 
cross-roads;  and  night  was  obliterating  the 
mighty  silhouette  of  the  cathedral  as  we  came 
upon  it  at  length  by  a  long  descent. 

It  is  always  a  loss  to  arrive  in  a  strange  town 
after  dark,  and  miss  those  preliminary  stages 
of  acquaintance  that  are  so  much  more  likely  to 
be  interesting  in  towns  than  in  people;  but  the 
deprivation  is  partly  atoned  for  by  the  sense  of 
adventure  with  which,  next  morning,  one  casts 
one's  self  upon  the  unknown.  There  is  no 
conjectural  first  impression  to  be  modified,  per- 

[6] 


AMIENS:     WEST  FRONT  OF  THE  CATHEDRAL 


BOULOGNE  TO  AMIENS 

haps  got  rid  of:    one's  mind  presents  a  blank 
page  for  the  town  to  write  its  name  on. 

At  Amiens  the  autograph  consists  of  one  big 
word:  the  cathedral.  Other,  fainter  writing 
may  come  out  when  one  has  leisure  to  seek  for 
it;  but  the  predominance  of  those  mighty  char- 
acters leaves,  at  first,  no  time  to  read  between 
the  lines.  And  here  it  may  be  noted  that,  out  of 
Italy,  it  takes  a  town  of  exceptional  strength  of 
character  to  hold  its  own  against  a  cathedral. 
In  England,  the  chapter-house  and  the  varied 
groupings  of  semi-ecclesiastical  buildings  consti- 
tuting the  close,  which  seem  to  form  a  connecting 
link  between  town  and  cathedral,  do  no  more, 
in  reality,  than  enlarge  the  skirts  of  the  monu- 
ment about  which  they  are  clustered;  and  even 
at  Winchester,  which  has  its  college  and  hospital 
to  oppose  to  the  predominance  of  the  central 
pile,  there  is,  after  all,  very  little  dispersal  of 
interest:  so  prodigious,  so  unparalleled,  as  mere 
feats  of  human  will-power,  are  these  vast  achieve- 
ments of  the  Middle  Ages.  In  northern  France, 
where  the  great  cathedrals  were  of  lay  founda- 
tion, and  consequently  sprang  up  alone,  without 
the  subordinate  colony  of  monastic  buildings  of 

[7] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

which  the  close  is  a  survival — and  where,  as  far 
as  monuments  of  any  importance  are  concerned, 
the  architectural  gap  sometimes  extends  from 
Louis  the  Saint  to  Louis  the  Fourteenth — the 
ascendancy  of  the  diocesan  church  is  necessarily 
even  more  marked.  Rouen  alone,  perhaps,  op- 
poses an  effectual  defence  to  this  concentration 
of  interest,  will  not  for  a  moment  let  itself  be 
elbowed  out  of  the  way  by  the  great  buttresses 
of  its  cathedral;  and  at  Bourges — but  Bourges 
and  Rouen  come  later  in  this  itinerary,  and 
meanwhile  here  we  are,  standing,  in  a  sharp 
shower,  under  a  notaire's  doorway,  and  looking 
across  the  little  square  at  the  west  front  of 
Amiens. 

Well!  No  wonder  such  a  monument  has 
silenced  all  competitors.  It  would  take  a  mighty 
counter-blast  to  make  itself  heard  against  "the 
surge  and  thunder"  of  that  cloud  of  witnesses 
choiring  forth  the  glories  of  the  Church  Trium- 
phant. Is  the  stage  too  crowded?  Is  there  a 
certain  sameness  in  the  overarching  tiers  of  the 
stone  hierarchy,  each  figure  set  in  precise  align- 
ment with  its  neighbours,  each  drapery  drawn 
within  the  same  perpendicular  bounds?    Yes, 

[8] 


BOULOGNE  TO  AMIENS 

perhaps — if  one  remembers  Rheims  and  Bourges ; 
but  if,  setting  aside  such  kindred  associations, 
one  surrenders  one's  self  uncritically  to  the  total 
impression  produced,  if  one  lets  the  fortunate 
accidents  of  time  and  weather  count  for  their  full 
value  in  that  total — for  Amiens  remains  merci- 
fully unscrubbed,  and  its  armies  of  saints  have 
taken  on  the  richest  patina  that  northern  stone 
can  acquire — if  one  views  the  thing,  in  short, 
partly  as  a  symbol  and  partly  as  a  "work  of 
nature"  (which  all  ancient  monuments  by  grace 
of  time  become),  then  the  front  of  Amiens  is 
surely  one  of  the  most  splendid  spectacles  that 
Gothic  art  can  show. 

On  the  symbolic  side  especially  it  would  be 
tempting  to  linger;  so  strongly  does  the  con- 
templation of  the  great  cathedrals  fortify  the 
conviction  that  their  chief  value,  to  this  later 
age,  is  not  so  much  aesthetic  as  moral.  The 
world  will  doubtless  always  divide  itself  into 
two  orders  of  mind:  that  which  sees  in  past 
expressions  of  faith,  political,  religious  or  intel- 
lectual, only  the  bonds  cast  off  by  the  spirit  of 
man  in  its  long  invincible  struggle  for  "more 
light";  and  that  which,   while  moved  by  the 

[9] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

spectacle  of  the  struggle,  cherishes  also  every 
sign  of  those  past  limitations  that  were,  after  all, 
each  in  its  turn,  symbols  of  the  same  effort 
toward  a  clearer  vision.  To  the  former  kind  of 
mind  the  great  Gothic  cathedral  will  be  chiefly 
interesting  as  a  work  of  art  and  a  page  of  history ; 
and  it  is  perhaps  proof  of  the  advantage  of  culti- 
vating the  other — the  more  complex — point  of 
view,  in  which  enfranchisement  of  thought  exists 
in  harmony  with  atavism  of  feeling,  that  it  per- 
mits one  to  appreciate  these  archaeological  values 
to  the  full,  yet  subordinates  them  to  the  more 
impressive  facts  of  which  they  are  the  immense 
and  moving  expression.  To  such  minds,  the 
rousing  of  the  sense  of  reverence  is  the  supreme 
gift  of  these  mighty  records  of  mediaeval  life: 
reverence  for  the  persistent,  slow-moving,  far- 
reaching  forces  that  brought  them  forth.  A 
great  Gothic  cathedral  sums  up  so  much  of 
history,  it  has  cost  so  much  in  faith  and  toil,  in 
blood  and  folly  and  saintly  abnegation,  it  has 
sheltered  such  a  long  succession  of  lives,  given 
collective  voice  to  so  many  inarticulate  and  con- 
tradictory cravings,  seen  so  much  that  was  sub- 
lime and  terrible,  or  foolish,  pitiful  and  grotesque, 

[10] 


BOULOGNE  TO  AMIENS 

that  it  is  like  some  mysteriously  preserved  an- 
cestor of  the  human  race,  some  Wandering  Jew 
grown  sedentary  and  throned  in  stony  contempla- 
tion, before  whom  the  fleeting  generations  come 
and  go. 

Yes — reverence  is  the  most  precious  emotion 
that  such  a  building  inspires:  reverence  for  the 
accumulated  experiences  of  the  past,  readiness  to 
puzzle  out  their  meaning,  unwillingness  to  dis- 
turb rashly  results  so  powerfully  willed,  so  labor- 
iously arrived  at — the  desire,  in  short,  to  keep 
intact  as  many  links  as  possible  between  yester- 
day and  to-morrow,  to  lose,  in  the  ardour  of  new 
experiment,  the  least  that  may  be  of  the  long 
rich  heritage  of  human  experience.  This,  at 
any  rate,  might  seem  to  be  the  cathedral's  word 
to  the  traveller  from  a  land  which  has  undertaken 
to  get  on  without  the  past,  or  to  regard  it  only  as 
a  "feature"  of  aesthetic  interest,  a  sight  to  which 
one  travels  rather  than  a  light  by  which  one 
lives. 

The  west  front  of  Amiens  says  this  word  with 
a  quite  peculiar  emphasis,  its  grand  unity  of 
structure  and  composition  witnessing  as  much  to 
constancy  of  purpose  as  to  persistence  of  effort. 

[11] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

So  steadily,  so  clearly,  was  this  great  thing  willed 
and  foreseen,  that  it  holds  the  mind  too  deeply 
subject  to  its  general  conception  to  be  imme- 
diately free  for  the  delighted  investigation  of 
detail.  But  within  the  building  detail  reasserts 
itself:  detail  within  detail,  worked  out  and 
multiplied  with  a  prodigality  of  enrichment  for 
which  a  counterpart  must  be  sought  beyond  the 
Alps.  The  interiors  of  the  great  French  cathe- 
drals are  as  a  rule  somewhat  gaunt  and  un- 
furnished, baring  their  structural  nakedness 
sublimely  but  rather  monotonously  to  eyes 
accustomed  to  the  Italian  churches  "  all  glorious 
within."  Here  at  Amiens,  however,  the  inner 
decking  of  the  shrine  has  been  piously  continued 
from  generation  to  generation,  and  a  quite  ex- 
traordinary wealth  of  adornment  bestowed  on 
the  choir  and  its  ambulatory.  The  great  sculpt- 
ured and  painted  frieze  encircling  the  outer  side 
of  the  choir  is  especially  surprising  in  a  French 
church,  so  seldom  were  the  stone  histories 
lavished  on  the  exterior  continued  within  the 
building;  and  it  is  a  farther  surprise  to  find  the 
same  tales  in  bas-relief  animating  and  enriching 
the  west  walls  of  the  transepts.     They  are  full 

[12] 


BOULOGNE  TO  AMIENS 

of  crowded  expressive  incidents,  these  stories 
of  local  saints  and  Scriptural  personages;  with 
a  Burgundian  richness  and  elaborateness  of 
costume,  and  a  quite  charming,  childish  insist- 
ence on  irrelevant  episode  and  detail — the  re- 
iterated "And  so,"  "And  then"  of  the  fairy-tale 
calling  off  one's  attention  into  innumerable  little 
by-paths,  down  which  the  fancy  of  fifteenth- 
century  worshippers  must  have  strayed,  with  oh ! 
what  blessedness  of  relief,  from  the  unintelligible 
rites  before  the  altar. 

Of  composition  there  is  none:  it  is  necessarily 
sacrificed  to  the  desire  to  stop  and  tell  everything; 
to  show,  for  instance,  in  an  interesting  parenthe- 
sis, exactly  what  Herod's  white  woolly  dog  was 
about  while  Salome  was  dancing  away  the 
Baptist's  head.  And  thus  one  is  brought  back 
to  the  perpetually  recurring  fact  that  all  northern 
art  is  anecdotic,  and  has  always  been  so;  and 
that,  for  instance,  all  the  elaborate  theories  of 
dramatic  construction  worked  out  to  explain  why 
Shakespeare  crowded  his  stage  with  subordinate 
figures  and  unnecessary  incidents,  and  would  cer- 
tainly, in  relating  the  story  of  Saint  John,  have 
included  Herod's  "Tray  and  Sweetheart"  among 

[13] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

the  dramatis  personam — that  such  theories  are 
but  an  unprofitable  evasion  of  the  ancient  eth- 
nological fact  that  the  Goth  has  always  told  his 
story  in  that  way. 


[H] 


n 

BEAUVAIS  AND   ROUEN 

THE  same  wonderful  white  road,  flinging 
itself  in  great  coils  and  arrow-flights  across 
the  same  spacious  landscape,  swept  us  on  the 
next  day  to  Beauvais.  If  there  seemed  to  be 
fewer  memorable  incidents  by  the  way — if  the 
villages  had  less  individual  character,  over  and 
above  their  general  charm  of  northern  thrift  and 
cosiness — it  was  perhaps  because  the  first  im- 
pression had  lost  its  edge;  but  we  caught  fine 
distant  reaches  of  field  and  orchard  and  wooded 
hillside,  giving  a  general  sense  that  it  would  be  a 
good  land  to  live  in — till  all  these  minor  sensa- 
tions were  swallowed  up  and  lost  in  the  over- 
whelming impression  of  Beauvais. 

The  town  itself — almost  purposely,  as  we  felt 
afterward — failed  to  put  itself  forward,  to  arrest 
us  by  any  of  the  minor  arts  which  Arras,  for 
instance,  had  so  seductively  exerted.     It  main- 

[15] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

tained  an  attitude  of  calm  aloofness,  of  affected 
ignorance  of  the  traveller's  object  in  visiting  it — 
suffering  its  little  shuttered  non-committal  streets 
to  lead  us  up,  tortuously,  to  the  drowsiest  little 
provincial  place,  with  the  usual  lime-arcades, 
and  the  usual  low  houses  across  the  way;  where 
suddenly  there  soared  before  us  the  great  mad 
broken  dream  of  Beauvais  choir — the  cathe- 
dral without  a  nave — the  Kubla  Khan  of  archi- 
tecture. .  . 

It  seems  in  truth  like  some  climax  of  mystic 
vision,  miraculously  caught  in  visible  form,  and 
arrested,  broken  off,  by  the  intrusion  of  the 
Person  from  Porlock — in  this  case,  no  doubt,  the 
panic-stricken  mason,  crying  out  to  the  entranced 
creator:  "We  simply  can't  keep  it  up!"  And 
because  it  literally  couldn't  be  kept  up — as  one 
or  two  alarming  collapses  soon  attested— it  had 
to  check  there  its  great  wave  of  stone,  hold  itself 
for  ever  back  from  breaking  into  the  long  ridge  of 
the  nave  and  flying  crests  of  buttress,  spire  and 
finial.  It  is  easy  for  the  critic  to  point  out  its 
structural  defects,  and  to  cite  them  in  illustration 
of  the  fact  that  your  true  artist  never  seeks  to 
wrest  from  their  proper  uses  the  materials  in 

[16] 


/ 


BEAUVAIS  AND  ROUEN 

which  he  works — does  not,  for  instance,  try  to 
render  metaphysical  abstractions  in  stone  and 
glass  and  lead;  yet  Beauvais  has  at  least  none 
of  the  ungainliness  of  failure:  it  is  like  a  great 
hymn  interrupted,  not  one  in  which  the  voices 
have  flagged;  and  to  the  desultory  mind  such 
attempts  seem  to  deserve  a  place  among  the  frag- 
mentary glories  of  great  art.  It  is,  at  any  rate, 
an  example  of  what  the  Gothic  spirit,  pushed  to 
its  logical  conclusion,  strove  for:  the  utterance 
of  the  unutterable;  and  he  who  condemns 
Beauvais  has  tacitly  condemned  the  whole  theory 
of  art  from  which  it  issued.  But  shall  we  not 
have  gained  greatly  in  our  enjoyment  of  beauty, 
as  well  as  in  serenity  of  spirit,  if,  instead  of  saying 
"this  is  good  art,"  or  "this  is  bad  art,"  we  say 
"this  is  classic"  and  "that  is  Gothic" — this 
transcendental,  that  rational — using  neither  term 
as  an  epithet  of  opprobrium  or  restriction,  but 
content,  when  we  have  performed  the  act  of  dis- 
crimination, to  note  what  forms  of  expression 
each  tendency  has  worked  out  for  itself? 

Beyond  Beauvais  the  landscape  became  more 
deeply  Norman — more  thatched  and  green  and 
orchard-smothered — though,  as  far  as  the  noting 

[17] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

of  detail  went,  we  did  not  really  get  beyond 
Beauvais  at  all,  but  travelled  on  imprisoned  in 
that  tremendous  memory  till  abruptly,  from  the 
crest  of  a  hill,  we  looked  down  a  long  green  val- 
ley to  Rouen  shining  on  its  river — belfries,  spires 
and  great  arched  bridges  drenched  with  a  golden 
sunset  that  seemed  to  shoot  skyward  from  the 
long  illuminated  reaches  of  the  Seine.  I  recall 
only  two  such  magic  descents  on  famous  towns: 
that  on  Orvieto,  from  the  last  hill  of  the  Viterbo 
road,  and  the  other — pitched  in  a  minor  key,  but 
full  of  a  small  ancient  majesty — the  view  of 
Wells  in  its  calm  valley,  as  the  Bath  road  gains 
the  summit  of  the  Mendip  hills. 

The  poetry  of  the  descent  to  Rouen  is,  unhap- 
pily, dispelled  by  the  long  approach  through  sor- 
did interminable  outskirts.  Orvieto  and  Wells, 
being  less  prosperous,  do  not  subject  the  trav- 
eller to  this  descent  into  prose,  which  leaves 
one  reflecting  mournfully  on  the  incompatibility, 
under  our  present  social  system,  between  pros- 
perity and  beauty.  As  for  Rouen  itself,  as  one 
passes  down  its  crowded  tram-lined  quays,  be- 
tween the  noisy  unloading  of  ships  and  the  clatter 
of  innumerable   cafes,   one  feels  that  the   old 

[18] 


ROUEN:    RUE  DE  L'HORLOQE 


BEAUVAIS  AND  ROUEN 

Gothic  town  one  used  to  know  cannot  really 
exist  any  more,  must  have  been  elbowed  out  of 
place  by  these  spreading  commercial  activities; 
but  it  turns  out  to  be  there,  after  all,  holding 
almost  intact,  behind  the  dull  mask  of  modern 
streets,  the  surprise  of  its  rich  medievalism. 

Here  indeed  the  traveller  finds  himself  in  no 
mere  "cathedral  town";  with  one  street  leading 
to  Saint  Ouen,  another  to  Saint  Maclou,  a  third 
to  the  beautiful  Palais  de  Justice,  the  cathedral 
itself  has  put  forth  the  appeal  of  all  its  accumu- 
lated treasures  to  make  one  take,  first  of  all,  the 
turn  to  its  doors.  There  are  few  completer  im- 
pressions in  Europe  than  that  to  be  received  as 
one  enters  the  Lady  Chapel  of  Rouen,  where 
an  almost  Italian  profusion  of  colour  and  orna- 
ment have  been  suffered  to  accumulate  slowly 
about  its  central  ornament — the  typically  north- 
ern monument  of  the  two  Cardinals  of  Amboise. 
There  could  hardly  be  a  better  example  of  the 
aesthetic  wisdom  of  "living  and  letting  live" 
than  is  manifested  by  the  happy  way  in  which 
supposedly  incompatible  artistic  ideals  have 
contrived  to  make  bon  menage  in  this  delicious 
corner.     It  is  a  miracle  that  they  have  been  al- 

[19] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

lowed  to  pursue  their  happy  experiment  till  now, 
for  there  must  have  been  moments  when,  to  the 
purist  of  the  Renaissance,  the  Gothic  tomb  of 
the  Cardinals  seemed  unworthy  to  keep  company 
with  the  Senechal  de  Breze's  monument,  in 
which  the  delicate  note  of  classicalism  reveals  a 
France  so  profoundly  modified  by  Italy;  just  as, 
later,  the  great  Berniniesque  altar-piece,  with  its 
twisted  columns  and  exuberance  of  golden  rays, 
must  have  narrowly  escaped  the  axe  of  the 
Gothic  reactionary.  But  there  they  all  are, 
blending  their  supposed  discords  in  a  more  com- 
plex harmony,  filling  the  privileged  little  edifice 
with  an  overlapping  richness  of  hue  and  line 
through  which  the  eye  perpetually  passes  back 
to  the  central  splendour  of  the  Cardinals'  tomb. 
A  magnificent  monument  it  is,  opposing  to  the 
sober  beauty  of  Germain  Pilon's  composition  its 
insolence  of  varied  detail — the  "this,  and  this, 
and  this"  of  the  loquacious  mediaeval  craftsman 
— all  bound  together  by  the  new  constructive 
sense  which  has  already  learned  how  to  bring  the 
topmost  bud  of  the  marble  finials  into  definite 
relation  with  the  little  hooded  mourners  bowed 
in  such  diversity  of  grief  in  their  niches  below  the 

[20] 


BEAUVAIS  AND  ROUEN 

tomb.  A  magnificent  monument — and  to  my 
mind  the  finest  thing  about  it  is  the  Cardinal 
Uncle's  nose.  The  whole  man  is  fine  in  his  sober 
dignity,  humbly  conscious  of  the  altar  toward 
which  he  faces,  arrogantly  aware  of  the  purple 
on  his  shoulders;  and  the  nose  is  the  epitome  of 
the  man.  We  live  in  the  day  of  little  noses: 
that  once  stately  feature,  intrinsically  feudal  and 
aristocratic  in  character — the  maschio  naso  ex- 
tolled of  Dante — has  shrunk  to  democratic  in- 
significance, like  many  another  fine  expression  of 
individualism.  And  so  one  must  look  to  the  old 
painters  and  sculptors  to  see  what  a  nose  was 
meant  to  be — the  prow  of  the  face ;  the  evidence 
of  its  owner's  standing,  of  his  relation  to  the 
world,  and  his  inheritance  from  the  past.  Even 
in  the  profile  of  the  Cardinal  Nephew,  kneeling  a 
little  way  behind  his  uncle,  the  gallant  feature  is 
seen  to  have  suffered  a  slight  diminution:  its 
spring,  still  bold,  is  less  commanding;  it  seems, 
as  it  were,  to  have  thrust  itself  against  a  less 
yielding  element.  And  so  the  deterioration  has 
gone  on  from  generation  to  generation,  till  the 
nose  has  worn  itself  blunt  against  the  increasing 
resistances   of   a   democratic   atmosphere,    and 

[21] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

stunted,  atrophied  and  amorphous,  serves  only, 
now,  to  let  us  know  when  we  have  the  influenza. 
With  the  revisiting  of  the  Cardinal's  nose  the 
first  object  of  our  visit  to  Rouen  had  been  ac- 
complished; the  second  led  us,  past  objects  of 
far  greater  importance,  to  the  well-arranged  but 
dull  gallery  where  Gerhard  David's  "Virgin  of 
the  Grapes"  is  to  be  seen.  Every  wanderer 
through  the  world  has  these  pious  pilgrimages  to 
perform,  generally  to  shrines  of  no  great  note — 
how  often,  for  instance,  is  one  irresistibly  drawn 
back  to  the  Transfiguration  or  to  the  Venus  of 
Milo? — but  to  lesser  works,  first  seen,  perhaps, 
at  a  fortunate  moment,  or  having  some  special 
quality  of  suggestion  and  evocation  that  the  per- 
fect equilibrium  of  the  masterpieces  causes  them 
to  lack.  So  I  know  of  some  who  go  first  to  "The 
Death  of  Procris"  in  the  National  Gallery;  to 
the  little  "Apollo  and  Marsyas"  of  the  Salon 
Carre;  to  a  fantastic  allegorical  picture,  subject 
and  artist  unknown,  in  an  obscure  corner  of  the 
Uffizi;  and  who  would  travel  more  miles  to  see 
again,  in  the  little  gallery  of  Rimini,  an  Entomb- 
ment of  the  school  of  Mantegna,  than  to  sit  be- 
neath the  vault  of  the  Sistine. 

[22] 


ROUEN:     THE  FACADE  OF  THE  CHURCH  OF  SAINT-MACLOU 


BEAUVAIS  AND  ROUEN 

All  of  which  may  seem  to  imply  an  uninten- 
tional disparagement  of  Gerhard  David's  picture, 
which  is,  after  all,  a  masterpiece  of  its  school; 
but  the  school  is  a  subordinate  one,  and,  save  to 
the  student  of  Flemish  art,  his  is  not  a  loud- 
sounding  name:  one  does  not  say,  for  instance, 
with  any  hope  of  general  recognition — "  Ah,  yes; 
that  reminds  me  of  such  and  such  a  bit  in  'The 
Virgin  of  the  Grapes.,,, 

All  the  more,  therefore,  may  one  enjoy  his 
picture,  in  the  empty  room  of  the  Rouen  gallery, 
with  that  gentle  sense  of  superiority  and  posses- 
sorship  to  which  the  discerner  of  obscure  merit 
is  surely  entitled.  How  much  of  its  charm  this 
particular  painting  owes  to  its  not  having  become 
the  picnic-ground  of  the  art-excursionist,  how 
much  to  its  own  intrinsic  beauty,  its  grave 
serenities  of  hue  and  gesture — how  much,  above 
all,  to  the  heavenly  translucence  of  that  bunch  of 
grapes  plucked  from  the  vines  of  Paradise — it  is 
part  of  its  very  charm  to  leave  unsettled,  to  keep 
among  the  mysteries  whereby  it  draws  one  back. 
Only  one  trembles  lest  it  should  cease  to  shine 
in  its  own  twilight  heaven  when  it  has  become 
a  star  in  Baedeker.  .  . 

[»] 


m 

FKOM   ROUEN   TO   FONTAINEBLEAU 

THE  Seine,  two  days  later,  by  the  sweetest 
curves,  drew  us  on  from  Rouen  to  Les 
Andelys,  past  such  bright  gardens  terraced  above 
its  banks,  such  moist  poplar-fringed  islands,  such 
low  green  promontories  deflecting  its  silver  flow, 
that  we  continually  checked  the  flight  of  the 
motor,  pausing  here,  and  here,  and  here  again, 
to  note  how  France  understands  and  enjoys 
and  lives  with  her  rivers. 

With  her  great  past,  it  seems,  she  has  partly 
ceased  to  live;  for,  ask  as  we  would,  we  could 
not,  that  morning,  learn  the  way  to  King 
Richard's  Chateau  Gaillard  on  the  cliff  above 
Les  Andelys.  Every  turn  from  the  route  de 
Paris  seemed  to  lead  straight  into  the  unknown; 
"mais  c'est  tout  droit  pour  Paris"  was  the 
invariable  answer  when  we  asked  our  way. 
Yet  a  few  miles  off  were  two  of  the  quaintest 

[24] 


FROM  ROUEN  TO  FONTAINEBLEAU 

towns  of  France — the  Little  and  Great  Andely — 
surmounted  by  a  fortress  marking  an  epoch  in 
military  architecture,  and  associated  with  the 
fortunes  of  one  of  the  most  romantic  figures  in 
history;  and  we  knew  that  if  we  clung  to  the 
windings  of  the  Seine  they  must  lead  us,  within 
a  few  miles,  to  the  place  we  sought.  And  so, 
having  with  difficulty  disentangled  ourselves 
from  the  route  de  Paris,  we  pushed  on,  by  quiet 
by-roads  and  unknown  villages,  by  memoirs  of 
grey  stone  peeping  through  high  thickets  of  lilac 
and  laburnum,  and  along  shady  river-reaches 
where  fishermen  dozed  in  their  punts,  and  cattle 
in  the  meadow-grass  beneath  the  willows — till 
the  soft  slopes  broke  abruptly  into  tall  cliffs 
shaggy  with  gorse,  and  the  easy  flow  of  the  river 
was  forced  into  a  sharp  twist  at  their  base. 
There  is  something  fantastic  in  this  sudden 
change  of  landscape  near  Les  Andelys  from  the 
familiar  French  river-scenery  to  what  might  be 
one  of  Piero  della  Francesca's  backgrounds  of 
strangely  fretted  rock  and  scant  black  vegeta- 
tion; while  the  Seine,  roused  from  its  progress 
through  yielding  meadows,  takes  a  majestic 
bend  toward  the  Little  Andely  in  the  bay  of  the 

[25] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

cliffs,  and  then  sweeps  out  below  the  height  on 
which  Coeur-de-Lion  planted  his  subtly  calcu- 
lated bastions. 

Ah — poor  fluttering  rag  of  a  ruin,  so  thin,  so 
time-worn,  so  riddled  with  storm  and  shell,  that 
it  droops  on  its  rock  like  a  torn  banner  with  for- 
gotten victories  in  its  folds!  How  much  more 
eloquently  these  tottering  stones  tell  their  story, 
how  much  deeper  into  the  past  they  take  us,  than 
the  dapper  weather-tight  castles — Pierrefonds, 
Langeais,  and  the  rest — on  which  the  arch- 
restorer  has  worked  his  will,  reducing  them  to 
mere  museum  specimens,  archaeological  toys, 
from  which  all  the  growths  of  time  have  been 
ruthlessly  stripped!  The  eloquence  of  the  Cha- 
teau Gaillard  lies  indeed  just  there — in  its  tell- 
ing us  so  discursively,  so  plaintively,  the  whole 
story  of  the  centuries — how  long  it  has  stood, 
how  much  it  has  seen,  how  far  the  world  has 
travelled  since  then,  and  to  what  a  hoarse, 
cracked  whisper  the  voice  of  feudalism  and 
chivalry  has  dwindled.  .  . 

The  town  that  once  cowered  under  the  pro- 
tection of  those  fallen  ramparts  still  groups  its 
stout  old  houses  about  a  church  so  grey  and 

[26] 


■ntk 


ROUEN:     MONUMENT  OF   THE   CARDINALS  OF  AMBOISE    IN    THE  CATHEDRAL 


FROM  ROUEN  TO  FONTAINEBLEAU 

venerable,  yet  so  sturdily  planted  on  its  ancient 
piers,  that  one  might  fancy  its  compassionately 
bidding  the  poor  ghost  of  a  fortress  come  down 
and  take  shelter  beneath  its  vaultings.  Com- 
mune and  castle,  they  have  changed  places  with 
the  shifting  fortunes  of  the  centuries,  the  weak 
growth  of  the  town  outstripping  the  arrogant 
brief  bloom  of  the  fortress — Richard's  "fair 
daughter  of  one  year" — which  had  called  it 
arbitrarily  into  being.  The  fortress  itself  is  now 
no  more  than  one  of  the  stage-properties  of  the 
Muse  of  History;  but  the  town,  poor  little  acci- 
dental offshoot  of  a  military  exigency,  has  built 
up  a  life  for  itself,  become  an  abiding  centre  of 
human  activities — though,  by  an  accident  in 
which  the  traveller  cannot  but  rejoice,  it  still 
keeps,  in  spite  of  its  sound  masonry  and  air  of  an- 
cient health,  that  almost  unmodernised  aspect 
which  makes  some  little  French  burghs  recall 
the  figure  of  a  lively  centenarian,  all  his  faculties 
still  active,  but  wearing  the  dress  of  a  former 
day. 

Regaining  the  route  de  Paris,  we  passed  once 
more  into  the  normal  Seine  landscape,  with  smil- 
ing towns  close-set  on  its  shores,  with  lilac  and 

[27] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

wistaria  pouring  over  high  walls,  with  bright 
little  cafes  on  sunny  village  squares,  with  flotillas 
of  pleasure-boats  moored  under  willow-shaded 
banks. 

Never  more  vividly  than  in  this  Seine  country 
does  one  feel  the  amenity  of  French  manners, 
the  long  process  of  social  adaptation  which  has 
produced  so  profound  and  general  an  intelligence 
of  life.  Every  one  we  passed  on  our  way,  from 
the  canal-boatman  to  the  white-capped  baker's 
lad,  from  the  marchande  des  quatre  saisons  to  the 
white  dog  curled  philosophically  under  her  cart, 
from  the  pastry-cook  putting  a  fresh  plate  of 
brioches  in  his  appetising  window  to  the  cure's 
bonne  who  had  just  come  out  to  drain  the  lettuce 
on  the  cure's  doorstep — all  these  persons  (under 
which  designation  I  specifically  include  the  dog) 
took  their  ease  or  pursued  their  business  with 
that  cheerful  activity  which  proceeds  from  an 
intelligent  acceptance  of  given  conditions.  They 
each  had  their  established  niche  in  life,  the 
frankly  avowed  interests  and  preoccupations  of 
their  order,  their  pride  in  the  smartness  of  the 
canal-boat,  the  seductions  of  the  show-window, 
the  glaze  of  the  brioches,  the  crispness  of  the 

[28] 


FROM  ROUEN  TO  FONTAINEBLEAU 

lettuce.  And  this  admirable  fitting  into  the 
pattern,  which  seems  almost  as  if  it  were  a  moral 
outcome  of  the  universal  French  sense  of  form, 
has  led  the  race  to  the  happy,  the  momentous 
discovery  that  good  manners  are  a  short  cut  to 
one's  goal,  that  they  lubricate  the  wheels  of  life 
instead  of  obstructing  them.  This  discovery — 
the  result,  as  it  strikes  one,  of  the  application  of 
the  finest  of  mental  instruments  to  the  muddled 
process  of  living — seems  to  have  illuminated  not 
only  the  social  relation  but  its  outward,  concrete 
expression,  producing  a  finish  in  the  material 
setting  of  life,  a  kind  of  conformity  in  inanimate 
things — forming,  in  short,  the  background  of  the 
spectacle  through  which  we  pass,  the  canvas  on 
which  it  is  painted,  and  expressing  itself  no  less 
in  the  trimness  of  each  individual  garden  than  in 
that  insistence  on  civic  dignity  and  comeliness 
so  miraculously  maintained,  through  every  tor- 
ment of  political  passion,  every  change  of  social 
conviction,  by  a  people  resolutely  addressed  to 
the  intelligent  enjoyment  of  living. 

By  Vernon,  with  its  trim  lime- walks  en  berceauy 
by  Mantes  with  its  bright  gardens,  and  the  grace- 
ful over-restored   church  which   dominates   its 

[29] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

square,  we  passed  on  to  Versailles,  forsaking  the 
course  of  the  Seine  that  we  might  have  a  glimpse 
of  the  country  about  Fontainebleau. 

At  the  top  of  the  route  du  Buc,  which  climbs 
by  sharp  windings  from  the  Place  du  Chateau  at 
Versailles,  one  comes  upon  the  arches  of  the 
aqueduct  of  Buc — one  of  the  monuments  of  that 
splendid  folly  which  created  the"  Golden  House" 
of  Louis  XIV,  and  drew  its  miraculous  groves 
and  gardens  from  the  waterless  plain  of  Ver- 
sailles. The  aqueduct,  forming  part  of  the  ex- 
travagant scheme  of  irrigation  of  which  the 
Machine  de  Marly  and  the  great  canal  of  Mainte- 
non  commemorate  successive  disastrous  phases, 
frames,  in  its  useless  lofty  openings,  such  charm- 
ing glimpses  of  the  country  to  the  southwest  of 
Versailles,  that  it  takes  its  place  among  those 
abortive  architectural  experiments  which  seem, 
after  all,  to  have  been  completely  justified  by  time. 

The  landscape  upon  which  the  arches  look  is 
a  high-lying  region  of  wood  and  vale,  with 
chateaux  at  the  end  of  long  green  vistas,  and  old 
flowery  villages  tucked  into  folds  of  the  hills.  At 
the  first  turn  of  the  road  above  Versailles  the 
well-kept  suburbanism  of  the  Parisian  environ 

[30] 


FROM  ROUEN  TO  FONTAINEBLEAU 

gives  way  to  the  real  look  of  the  country — well- 
kept  and  smiling  still,  but  tranquil  and  sweetly 
shaded,  with  big  farmyards,  quiet  country  lanes, 
and  a  quiet  country  look  in  the  peasants'  faces. 

In  passing  through  some  parts  of  France  one 
wonders  where  the  inhabitants  of  the  chateaux 
go  when  they  emerge  from  their  gates — so  inter- 
minably, beyond  those  gates,  do  the  flat  fields, 
divided  by  straight  unshaded  roads,  reach  out  to 
every  point  of  the  compass;  but  here  the  wooded 
undulations  of  the  country,  the  friendliness  of 
the  villages,  the  recurrence  of  big  rambling  farm- 
steads— some,  apparently,  the  remains  of  fortified 
monastic  granges — all  suggest  the  possibility  of 
something  resembling  the  English  rural  life, 
with  its  traditional  ties  between  park  and  fields. 

The  brief  journey  between  Versailles  and  Fon- 
tainebleau  offers — if  one  takes  the  longer  way,  by 
Saint  R&ny-les-Chevreuse  and  Etampes — a  suc- 
cession of  charming  impressions,  more  varied 
than  one  often  finds  in  a  long  day's  motor-run 
through  France;  and  midway  one  comes  upon 
the  splendid  surprise  of  Dourdan. 

Ignorance  is  not  without  its  aesthetic  uses; 
and  to  drop  down  into  the  modest  old  town  with- 

[31] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

out  knowing — or  having  forgotten,  if  one  prefers 
to  put  it  so — the  great  castle  of  Philip  Augustus, 
which,  moated,  dungeoned,  ivy-walled,  still  pos- 
sesses its  peaceful  central  square — to  come  on 
this  vigorous  bit  of  mediaeval  arrogance,  with  the 
little  houses  of  Dourdan  still  ducking  their  humble 
roofs  to  it  in  an  obsequious  circle — well !  to  taste 
the  full  flavour  of  such  sensations,  it  is  worth  while 
to  be  of  a  country  where  the  last  new  grain-elevator 
or  office  building  is  the  only  monument  that  re- 
ceives homage  from  the  surrounding  architecture. 
Dourdan,  too,  has  the  crowning  charm  of  an 
old  inn  facing  its  chateau-fort — such  an  inn  as 
Manon  and  des  Grieux  dined  in  on  the  way  to 
Paris — where,  in  a  large  courtyard  shaded  by 
trees,  one  may  feast  on  strawberries  and  cheese 
at  a  table  enclosed  in  clipped  shrubs,  with  dogs 
and  pigeons  amicably  prowling  for  crumbs,  and 
the  host  and  hostess,  their  maid-servants,  ostlers 
and  marmitons  breakfasting  at  another  long  table, 
just  across  the  hedge.  Now  that  the  demands 
of  the  motorist  are  introducing  modern  plumbing 
and  Maple  furniture  into  the  uttermost  parts 
of  France,  these  romantic  old  inns,  where  it  is 
charming  to  breakfast,  if  precarious  to  sleep,  are 

[82] 


FROM  ROUEN  TO  FONTAINEBLEAU 

becoming  as  rare  as  the  mediaeval  keeps  with 
which  they  are,  in  a  way,  contemporaneous ;  and 
Dourdan  is  fortunate  in  still  having  two  such 
perfect  specimens  to  attract  the  attention  of  the 
archaeologist. 

Etampes,  our  next  considerable  town,  seemed 
by  contrast  rather  featureless  and  disappointing; 
yet,  for  that  very  reason,  so  typical  of  the  average 
French  country  town — dry,  compact,  unsenti- 
mental, as  if  avariciously  hoarding  a  long  rich 
past — that  its  one  straight  grey  street  and  squat 
old  church  will  hereafter  always  serve  for  the 
ville  de  province  background  in  my  staging  of 
French  fiction.  Beyond  Etampes,  as  one  ap- 
proaches Fontainebleau,  the  scenery  grows  ex- 
tremely picturesque,  with  bold  outcroppings  of 
blackened  rock,  fields  of  golden  broom,  groves 
of  birch  and  pine — first  hints  of  the  fantastic 
sandstone  scenery  of  the  forest.  And  presently 
the  long  green  aisles  opened  before  us  in  all  the 
freshness  of  spring  verdure — tapering  away  right 
and  left  to  distant  ronds-points>  to  mossy  stone 
crosses  and  obelisks — and  leading  us  toward  sun- 
set to  the  old  town  in  the  heart  of  the  forest. 

[88] 


IV 

THE  LOIRE  AND  THE  INDRE 

FONTAINEBLEAU  is  charming  in  May, 
and  at  no  season  do  its  glades  more  invit- 
ingly detain  the  wanderer;  but  it  belonged  to 
the  familiar,  the  already-experienced  part  of  our 
itinerary,  and  we  had  to  press  on  to  the  unex- 
plored. So  after  a  day's  roaming  of  the  forest, 
and  a  short  flight  to  Moret,  medisevally  seated  in 
its  stout  walls  on  the  poplar-edged  Loing,  we 
started  on  our  way  to  the  Loire. 

Here,  too,  our  wheels  were  still  on  beaten 
tracks;  though  the  morning's  flight  across  coun- 
try to  Orleans  was  meant  to  give  us  a  glimpse  of 
a  new  region.  But  on  that  unhappy  morning 
Boreas  was  up  with  all  his  pack,  and  hunted  us 
savagely  across  the  naked  plain,  now  behind,  now 
on  our  quarter,  now  dashing  ahead  to  lie  in  am- 
bush behind  a  huddled  village,  and  leap  on  us  as 
we  rounded  its  last  house.     The  plain  stretched 

[34] 


THE  LOIRE  AND  THE  INDRE 

on  interminably,  and  the  farther  it  stretched  the 
harder  the  wind  raced  us ;  so  that  Pithiviers,  spite 
of  dulcet  associations,  appeared  to  our  shrinking 
eyes  only  as  a  wind-break,  eagerly  striven  for 
and  too  soon  gained  and  passed;  and  when,  at 
luncheon-time,  we  beat  our  way,  spent  and 
wheezing,  into  Orleans,  even  the  serried  mem- 
ories of  that  venerable  city  endeared  it  to  us  less 
than  the  fact  that  it  had  an  inn  where  we  might 
at  last  find  shelter. 

The  above  wholly  inadequate  description  of 
an  interesting  part  of  France  will  have  convinced 
any  rational  being  that  motoring  is  no  way  to 
see  the  country.  And  that  morning  it  certainly 
was  not;  but  then,  what  of  the  afternoon? 
When  we  rolled  out  of  Orleans  after  luncheon, 
both  the  day  and  the  scene  had  changed;  and 
what  other  form  of  travel  could  have  brought  us 
into  such  communion  with  the  spirit  of  the  Loire 
as  our  smooth  flight  along  its  banks  in  the  bland 
May  air?  For,  after  all,  if  the  motorist  some- 
times misses  details  by  going  too  fast,  he  some- 
times has  them  stamped  into  his  memory  by  an 
opportune  puncture  or  a  recalcitrant  "magneto" ; 
and  if,  on  windy  days,  he  has  to  rush  through 

[35] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

nature  blindfold,  on  golden  afternoons  such  as 
this  he  can  drain  every  drop  of  her  precious 
essence. 

Certainly  we  got  a  great  deal  of  the  Loire  as 
we  followed  its  windings  that  day:  a  great  sense 
of  the  steely  breadth  of  its  flow,  the  amenity  of 
its  shores,  the  sweet  flatness  of  the  richly  gar- 
dened and  vineyarded  landscape,  as  of  a  highly 
cultivated  but  slightly  insipid  society;  an  im- 
pression of  long  white  villages  and  of  stout  conical 
towns  on  little  hills;  of  old  brown  Beaugency  in 
its  cup  between  two  heights,  and  Madame  de 
Pompadour's  Menars  on  its  bright  terraces;  of 
Blois,  nobly  bestriding  the  river  at  a  noble  bend ; 
and  farther  south,  of  yellow  cliffs  honeycombed 
with  strange  dwellings;  of  Chaumont  and  Am- 
boise  crowning  their  heaped-up  towns;  of 
manoirs,  walled  gardens,  rich  pastures,  willowed 
islands ;  and  then,  toward  sunset,  of  another  long 
bridge,  a  brace  of  fretted  church-towers,  and  the 
widespread  roofs  of  Tours. 

Had  we  visited  by  rail  the  principal  places 
named  in  this  itinerary,  necessity  would  have 
detained  us  longer  in  each,  and  we  should  have 
had  a  fuller  store  of  specific  impressions ;  but  we 

£36] 


THE  LOIRE  AND  THE  INDRE 

should  have  missed  what  is,  in  one  way,  the 
truest  initiation  of  travel,  the  sense  of  continuity, 
of  relation  between  different  districts,  of  familiar- 
ity with  the  unnamed,  unhistoried  region  stretch- 
ing between  successive  centres  of  human  history, 
and  exerting,  in  deep  unnoticed  ways,  so  per- 
sistent an  influence  on  the  turn  that  history 
takes.  And  after  all — though  some  people  seem 
to  doubt  the  fact — it  is  possible  to  stop  a  motor 
and  get  out  of  it;  and  if,  on  our  way  down  the 
Loire,  we  exercised  this  privilege  infrequently,  it 
was  because,  here  again,  we  were  in  a  land  of  old 
acquaintance,  of  which  the  general  topography 
was  just  the  least  familiar  part. 

It  was  not  till,  two  days  later,  we  passed  out  of 
Tours — not,  in  fact,  till  we  left  to  the  northward 
the  towered  pile  of  Loches — that  we  found  our- 
selves once  more  in  a  new  country.  It  was  a 
cold  day  of  high  clouds  and  flying  sunlight:  just 
the  sky  to  overarch  the  wide  rolling  landscape 
through  which  the  turns  of  the  Indre  were  lead- 
ing us.  To  the  south,  whither  we  were  bound, 
lay  the  Berry — the  land  of  George  Sand;  while 
to  the  northwest  low  acclivities  sloped  away,  with 
villages  shining  on  their  sides.     One  arrow  of 

[37] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

sunlight,  I  remember,  transfixed  for  a  second  an 
unknown  town  on  one  of  these  slopes :  a  town  of 
some  consequence,  with  walls  and  towers  that 
flashed  far-off  and  mysterious  across  the  cloudy 
plain.  Who  has  not  been  tantalised  in  travelling, 
by  the  glimpse  of  such  cities — unnamed,  undis- 
coverable  afterward  by  the  minutest  orientations 
of  map  and  guide-book?  Certainly,  to  the  un- 
initiated, no  hill-town  is  visible  on  that  particu- 
larly level  section  of  the  map  of  France;  yet 
there  sloped  the  hill,  there  shone  the  town — not 
a  moment's  mirage,  but  the  companion  of  an 
hour's  travel,  dominating  the  turns  of  our  road, 
beckoning  to  us  across  the  increasing  miles,  and 
causing  me  to  vow,  as  we  lost  the  last  glimpse  of 
its  towers,  that  next  year  I  would  go  back  and 
make  it  give  up  its  name. 

But  now  we  were  approaching  a  town  with  a 
name — a  name  so  encrusted  and  overgrown  with 
associations  that  it  was  undeniably  disappoint- 
ing, as  we  reached  its  outskirts,  to  find  Chateau- 
roux — aside  from  its  fine  old  chateau  on  the 
Indre — so  exactly  like  other  dull  French  towns, 
so  provokingly  unconscious  of  being  one  of  the 
capital  cities  of  literature.     And  it  seems,  in  fact, 

[98] 


THE  LOIRE  AND  THE  INDRE 

literally  as  well  as  figuratively  unaware  of  its 
distinction.  Fame  throws  its  circles  so  wide  that 
it  makes  not  a  ripple  near  home;  and  even  the 
alert  landlady  of  the  Hotel  Sainte  Catherine 
wrinkled  her  brows  perplexedly  at  our  question: 
"Is  one  permitted  to  visit  the  house  of  George 
Sand?" 

"Le  chateau  de  George  Sand?  (A  pause  of 
reflection.)  C'est  Vecrivain,  rCest-ce  pas?  (An- 
other pause.)  C'est  a  Nohant,  le  chateau?  Mais, 
Madame,  je  ne  saurais  vous  le  dire" 

Yet  here  was  the  northern  gate  of  the  Sand 
country — it  was  here  that,  for  years,  the  leaders 
of  the  most  sedentary  profession  of  a  sedentary 
race — the  hommes  de  lettres  of  France — descended 
from  the  Paris  express,  and  took  a  diligence  on 
their  pilgrimage  to  the  oracle.  When  one  con- 
siders the  fatigue  of  the  long  day's  railway  jour- 
ney, and  the  French  dread  of  deplacements,  the 
continual  stream  of  greatness  that  Paris  poured 
out  upon  Nohant  gives  the  measure  of  what 
Nohant  had  to  offer  in  return. 

As  we  sat  at  breakfast  in  the  inn  dining-room 
we  irreverently  pictured  some  of  these  great  per- 
sonages— Liszt,  Sainte-Beuve,  Gautier,  Dumas 

[39] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

fils,  Flaubert — illustrious  figures  in  the  queer  dis- 
habille of  travel,  unwinding  strange  cache-nez, 
solicitous  for  embroidered  carpet-bags,  seated  in 
that  very  room  over  their  coffee  and  omelette, 
or  climbing  to  the  coupe  of  the  diligence  outside. 
And  then  we  set  out  on  the  same  road. 

Straight  as  an  arrow,  after  the  unvarying 
fashion  of  the  French  government  highway,  it 
runs  southeast  through  vast  wheatfields,  past 
barns  and  farmhouses  grouped  as  in  the  van- 
ished "drawing-books"  of  infancy — now  touch- 
ing, now  deserting  the  Indre  banks,  as  the  capri- 
cious river  throws  its  poplar-edged  loops  across 
the  plain.  But  presently  we  began  to  mount 
insensibly;  till  at  length  a  sharp  turn,  and  an 
abrupt  fall  of  the  land,  brought  us  out  on  a 
ridge  above  the  plain  of  the  Berry,  with  the  river 
reappearing  below,  and  far,  far  south  a  blue  haze 
of  mountains. 

The  road,  after  that,  descends  again  by  gentle 
curves,  acquainting  one  gradually  with  the 
charming  details  of  the  foreground — pale-green 
copses,  fields  hedged  with  hawthorn,  long  lines 
of  poplars  in  the  plain — while,  all  the  way,  the 
distant  horizon  grows  richer,  bluer  and  more 

[40] 


THE  LOIRE  AND  THE  INDRE 

mysterious.  It  is  a  wide  lonely  country,  with 
infrequent  villages — mere  hamlets — dotting  the 
fields;  one  sees  how  the  convivial  Dudevant, 
coming  from  the  livelier  Gascony,  might  have 
found  it,  for  purposes  of  pot-house  sociability,  a 
little  thinly  settled.  At  one  of  these  small  lonely 
villages — Vicq — just  where  the  view  spreads 
widest,  the  road  loses  it  again  by  a  gradual  de- 
scent of  a  mile  or  so;  and  at  the  foot  of  the  hill, 
among  hawthorn  and  lilac  hedges,  through  the 
boughs  of  budding  trees,  a  high  slate  roof  shows 
to  the  left — the  roof  of  a  plain-faced  fawn- 
coloured  house,  the  typical  gentilhommiere  of 
the  French  country-side. 

No  other  house  is  in  sight:  only,  from  behind 
the  trees,  peep  two  or  three  humble  tiled  cottages, 
dependencies  of  the  larger  pile.  There  is  noth- 
ing to  tell  us  the  name  of  the  house — nothing  to 
signalise  it,  to  take  it  out  of  the  common.  It 
stands  there  large,  placid,  familiarly  related  to 
the  high-road  and  the  farm,  like  one  side  of  the 
extraordinary  woman  it  sheltered;  and  perhaps 
that  fact  helps  to  suggest  its  name,  to  render  al- 
most superfluous  our  breathless  question  to  the 
pretty  goose-girl  knitting  under  the  hedge. 

[41] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

"Mais  ouiy  Madame — c'est  Nohant." 
The  goose-girl — pink  as  a  hawthorn  bud,  a 
"kerchief"  tied  about  her  curls — might  really,  in 
the  classic  phrase  of  sentimental  travel,  have 
"stepped  out"  of  one  of  the  novels  written  yon- 
der, under  the  high  roof  to  which  she  pointed: 
she  had  the  honest  savour  of  the  terroir,  yet  with 
that  superadded  grace  that  the  author  of  the 
novels  has  been  criticised  for  bestowing  on  her 
peasants.  She  formed,  at  any  rate,  a  charming 
link  between  our  imagination  and  the  famous 
house;  and  we  presently  found  that  the  miracle 
which  had  preserved  her  in  all  her  1830  grace  had 
been  extended  to  the  whole  privileged  spot,  which 
seemed,  under  a  clear  glass  bell  of  oblivion,  to 
have  been  kept  intact,  unchanged,  like  some 
wonderful  "exhibit"  illustrative  of  the  extraordi- 
nary history  lived  within  it. 

The  house  faces  diagonally  toward  the  road, 
from  which  a  high  wall  once  screened  it;  but  it 
is  written  in  the  Histoire  de  ma  vie  that  M.  Dude- 
vant,  in  a  burst  of  misdirected  activity,  threw 
down  several  yards  of  this  wall,  and  filled  the 
opening  with  a  hedge.  The  hedge  is  still  there; 
and  thanks  to  this  impulse  of  destruction,  the 

[42] 


NOHANT:     CHATEAU  OF  GEORGE  SAND 


THE  LOIRE  AND  THE  INDRE 

traveller  obtains  a  glimpse  of  grass  terraces  and 
stone  steps,  set  in  overgrown  thickets  of  lilac, 
hawthorn  and  acacia,  and  surmounted  by  the 
long  tranquil  front  of  the  chateau.  On  each  side, 
beyond  the  stretch  of  hedge,  the  wall  begins 
again ;  terminating,  at  one  corner  of  the  property, 
in  a  massive  old  cow-stable  with  a  round  pepper- 
pot  tower;  at  the  opposite  end  is  a  charming 
conical-roofed  garden-pavilion,  with  mossy  steps 
ascending  to  it  from  the  road. 

At  right  angles  to  the  highway,  a  shady  lane 
leads  down  past  the  farm  buildings ;  and  follow- 
ing this,  one  comes,  around  their  flank,  on  a  large 
pleasant  untidy  farm-yard,  full  of  cows  and 
chickens,  and  divided  by  the  long  range  of  the 
communs  from  the  entrance-court  of  the  chateau. 
Farm-yard  and  court  both  face  on  a  small  grassy 
place — what,  in  England,  would  pass  for  a  di- 
minutive common — in  the  centre  of  which,  under 
an  ancient  walnut-tree,  stands  a  much  more 
ancient  church — a  church  so  tiny,  black  and 
shrunken  that  it  somehow  suggests  a  blind  old 
peasant  woman  mumbling  and  dozing  in  the 
shade.  This  is  the  parish  church  of  Nohant; 
and  a  few  yards  from  it,  adjoining  the  court  of 

[43] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

the  chateau,  lies  the  little  walled  graveyard  which 
figures  so  often  in  the  Histoire  de  ma  vie,  and 
where  she  who  described  it  now  rests  with  her 
kin.  The  graveyard  is  defended  from  intrusion 
by  a  high  wall  and  a  locked  gate;  and  after  all 
her  spirit  is  not  there,  but  in  the  house  and  the 
garden — above  all,  in  the  little  cluster  of  humble 
old  cottages  enclosing  the  shady  place  about  the 
church,  and  constituting,  apparently,  the  whole 
village  of  Nohant.  Like  the  goose-girl,  these 
little  houses  are  surprisingly  picturesque  and  sen- 
timental; and  their  mossy  roofs,  their  clipped 
yews,  the  old  white-capped  women  who  sit  spin- 
ning on  their  doorsteps,  supply  almost  too  ideal 
an  answer  to  one's  hopes. 

And  when,  at  last,  excitedly  and  enchantedly, 
one  has  taken  in  the  quiet  perfection  of  it  all,  and 
turned  to  confront  the  great  question:  Does  a 
sight  of  Nohant  deepen  the  mystery,  or  elucidate 
it  ? — one  can  only  answer,  in  the  cautious  speech 
of  the  New  England  casuist:  Both.  For  if  it 
helps  one  to  understand  one  side  of  George  Sand's 
life,  it  seems  actually  to  cast  a  thicker  obscurity 
over  others — even  if,  among  the  different  sides 
contemplated,  one  includes  only  those  directly 

[44] 


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'    1 

THE  LOIRE  AND  THE  INDRE 

connected  with  the  place,  and  not  the  innumera- 
ble facets  that  reflected  Paris,  Venice,  Fontaine- 
bleau  and  Majorca. 

The  first  surprise  is  to  find  the  place,  on  the 
whole,  so  much  more — shall  one  say  ? — dignified 
and  decent,  so  much  more  conscious  of  social 
order  and  restraints,  than  the  early  years  of  the 
life  led  in  it.  The  pictures  of  Nohant  in  the 
Histoire  de  ma  vie  are  unlike  any  other  descrip- 
tion of  French  provincial  manners  at  that  period, 
suggesting  rather  an  affinity  with  the  sombre 
Bronte  background  than  the  humdrum  but  con- 
ventional and  orderly  existence  of  the  French 
rural  gentry. 

When  one  recalls  the  throng  of  motley  char- 
acters who  streamed  in  and  out  of  that  quiet 
house — the  illegitimate  children  of  both  sides, 
living  in  harmony  with  one  another  and  with  the 
child  of  wedlock,  the  too-intimate  servants,  the 
peasant  playmates,  the  drunken  boon  compan- 
ions— when  one  turns  to  the  Hogarthian  pictures 
of  midnight  carouses  presided  over  by  the  up- 
roarious Hippolyte  and  the  sombrely  tippling 
Dudevant,  while  their  wives  sat  disgusted,  but 
apparently  tolerant,  above  stairs,  one  feels  one's 

[45] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

self  in  the  sinister  gloom  of  Wildfell  Hall  rather 
than  in  the  light  temperate  air  of  a  French 
province.  And  somehow,  unreasonably  of  course, 
one  expects  the  house  to  bear,  even  outwardly, 
some  mark  of  that  dark  disordered  period — or,  if 
not,  then  of  the  cheerful  but  equally  incoherent 
and  inconceivable  existence  led  there  when  the 
timid  Madame  Dudevant  was  turning  into  the 
great  George  Sand,  and  the  strange  procession 
which  continued  to  stream  through  the  house 
was  composed  no  longer  of  drunken  gentlemen- 
farmers  and  left-handed  peasant  relations,  but  of 
an  almost  equally  fantastic  and  ill-assorted  com- 
pany of  ex-priests,  naturalists,  journalists,  Saint- 
Simonians,  riders  of  every  conceivable  religious, 
political  and  literary  hobby,  among  whom  the 
successive  tutors  of  the  adored  Maurice — forming 
in  themselves  a  line  as  long  as  the  kings  in  Mac- 
beth!— perhaps  take  the  palm  for  oddness  of 
origin  and  adaptability  of  manners. 

One  expected  the  scene  of  these  confused  and 
incessant  comings  and  goings  to  wear  the  injured 
declasse  air  of  a  house  which  has  never  had  its 
rights  respected — a  house  long  accustomed  to 
jangle  its  dinner-bell  in  vain  and  swing  its  broken 

[46] 


THE  LOIRE  AND  THE  INDRE 

hinges  unheeded;  and  instead,  one  beholds  this 
image  of  aristocratic  well-being,  this  sober  edifice, 
conscious  in  every  line  of  its  place  in  the  social 
scale,  of  its  obligations  to  the  church  and  cottages 
under  its  wing,  its  rights  over  the  acres  surround- 
ing it.  And  so  one  may,  not  too  fancifully, 
recognise  in  it  the  image  of  those  grave  ideals  to 
which  George  Sand  gradually  conformed  the 
passionate  experiment  of  her  life;  may  even  in- 
dulge one's  self  by  imagining  that  an  old  house 
so  marked  in  its  very  plainness,  its  conformity, 
must  have  exerted,  over  a  mind  as  sensitive  as 
hers,  an  unperceived  but  persistent  influence, 
giving  her  that  centralising  weight  of  association 
and  habit  which  is  too  often  lacking  in  modern 
character,  and  standing  ever  before  her  as  the 
shrine  of  those  household  pieties  to  which,  incon- 
sistently enough,  but  none  the  less  genuinely,  the 
devotion  of  her  last  years  was  paid. 


[47] 


NOHANT  TO   CLERMONT 

THERE  happened  to  us,  on  leaving  Nohant, 
what  had  happened  after  Beauvais:  the 
quiet  country  house  by  the  roadside,  like  the 
mighty  Gothic  choir,  possessed  our  thoughts  to 
the  exclusion  of  other  impressions.  As  far  as 
La  Chatre,  indeed — the  little  town  on  the  Indre, 
where  young  Madame  Dudevant  spent  a  winter 
to  further  her  husband's  political  ambitions — we 
were  still  within  the  Nohant  radius;  and  it  was 
along  the  straight  road  we  were  travelling  that 
poor  old  Madame  Dupin  de  Francueil — si  douil- 
lette  that  she  could  hardly  make  the  round  of  the 
garden — fled  in  her  high-heeled  slippers  on  the 
fatal  night  when  her  son,  returning  from  a  gay 
supper  at  La  Chatre,  was  flung  from  his  horse 
and  killed  at  the  entrance  to  the  town.  These 
scenes  from  the  Histoire  de  ma  vie  are  so  vivid, 
they  live  so  poignantly  in  memory,  that  in  re- 

[48] 


NOHANT  TO  CLERMONT 

living  them  on  the  spot  one  feels,  with  Goncourt, 
how  great  their  writer  would  have  been  had 
her  intrepid  pen  more  often  remained  dans  le 
vrai. 

La  Chatre  is  a  charming  town,  with  a  remark- 
ably picturesque  approach,  on  the  Nohant  side, 
across  an  old  bridge  out  of  which  an  old  house, 
with  a  steep  terraced  garden,  seems  to  grow  with 
the  conscious  pleasure  of  well-grouped  masonry; 
and  the  streets  beyond  have  an  air  of  ripe  experi- 
ence tempered  by  gaiety,  like  that  of  those  ironic 
old  eighteenth-century  faces  wherein  the  wrinkles 
are  as  gay  as  dimples. 

Southward  from  La  Chatre,  the  road  runs 
through  a  beautiful  hilly  country  to  Montlucon 
on  the  Cher :  a  fine  old  border  town,  with  a  brave 
fighting  past,  and  interesting  relics  of  Bourbon 
ascendancy;  but  now  deeply  disfigured  by  hid- 
eous factories  and  long  grimy  streets  of  opera- 
tives' houses.  In  deploring  the  ravages  of  modern 
industry  on  one  of  these  rare  old  towns,  it  is  hard 
to  remember  that  they  are  not  museum  pieces, 
but  settlements  of  human  beings  with  all  the 
normal  desire  to  prosper  at  whatever  cost  to  the 
physiognomy  of  their  birthplace;  and  Montlucon 

[49] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

in  especial  seems  to  have  been  a  very  pelican  to 
the  greed  of  her  offspring. 

We  had  meant  to  spend  the  night  there,  but 
there  was  a  grimness  about  the  inn — the  special 
grimness  of  which  the  commercial  travellers'  hotel 
in  the  French  manufacturing  town  holds  the  de- 
pressing secret — that  forbade  even  a  glance  at 
the  bedrooms ;  and  though  it  was  near  sunset  we 
pressed  on  for  Vichy.  We  had,  in  consequence, 
but  a  cold  twilight  glimpse  of  the  fine  gorge  of 
Montaigut,  through  which  the  road  cuts  its  way 
to  Gannat,  the  first  town  to  the  north  of  the 
Limagne;  and  night  had  set  in  when  we  trav- 
ersed the  plain  of  the  Allier.  On  good  French 
roads,  however,  a  motor- journey  by  night  is  not 
without  its  compensations;  and  our  dark  flight 
through  mysterious  fields  and  woods  terminated, 
effectively  enough,  with  the  long  descent  down 
a  lamp-garlanded  boulevard  into  the  inanimate 
white  watering-place. 

Vichy,  in  fact,  had  barely  opened  the  shutters 
of  its  fashionable  hotels:  the  season  does  not 
begin  till  June,  and  in  May  only  a  few  premature 
bathers — mostly  English — shiver  in  corners  of  the 
marble  halls,  or  disconsolately  peruse  last  year's 

[50] 


CLERMONT-FERRAND:     NOTRE-DAME  DU   PORT 


NOHANT  TO  CLERMONT 

news  in  the  deserted  reading-rooms.  But  even 
in  this  semi-chrysalis  stage  the  town  presented 
itself,  the  next  morning,  as  that  rarest  of  spec- 
tacles— grace  triumphant  over  the  processes  of 
the  toilet.  Only  a  pretty  woman  and  a  French 
mile  d'eau  can  look  really  charming  in  morning 
dishabille;  and  the  way  in  which  Vichy  accom- 
plishes the  feat  would  be  a  lesson  to  many  pretty 
women. 

The  place,  at  all  seasons,  is  an  object-lesson 
to  less  enlightened  municipalities ;  and  when  one 
finds  one's  self  vainly  wishing  that  art  and  his- 
tory, and  all  the  rich  tapestry  of  the  past,  might 
somehow  be  brought  before  the  eyes  of  our  self- 
sufficient  millions,  one  might  pause  to  ask  if 
the  sight  of  a  well-kept,  self-respecting  French 
town,  carefully  and  artistically  planned  as  a 
setting  to  the  amenities  of  life,  would  not,  after 
all,  offer  the  more  salutary  and  surprising  ex- 
ample. 

Vichy,  even  among  French  towns,  stands  out 
as  a  singularly  finished  specimen  of  what  such 
municipal  pride  can  accomplish.  From  its  broad 
plane-shaded  promenade,  flanked  by  bright-faced 
hotels,  and  by  the  arcades  of  the  Casino,  to  the 

[51] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

park  on  the  Allier,  and  the  wide  circumjacent 
boulevards,  it  wears,  at  every  turn,  the  same  trim 
holiday  air,  the  rouge  and  patches  of  smooth 
gravel,  bright  flower-borders,  gay  shops,  shady 
benches,  inviting  cafes.  Even  the  cab-stands, 
with  their  smart  vis-a-vis  and  victorias  drawn  by 
plump  cobs  in  tinkling  harnesses,  seem  part  of 
a  dream-town,  where  all  that  is  usually  sordid 
and  shabby  has  been  touched  by  the  magic  wand 
of  trimness;  or  where  some  Utopian  millionaire 
has  successfully  demonstrated  that  the  sordid  and 
shabby  need  never  exist  at  all. 

But,  to  the  American  observer,  Vichy  is  per- 
haps most  instructive  just  because  it  is  not  the 
millionaire's  wand  which  has  worked  the  spell; 
because  the  town  owes  its  gaiety  and  its  elegance, 
not  to  the  private  villa,  the  rich  man's  "show- 
place,"  but  to  wise  public  expenditure  of  the 
money  which  the  bathers  annually  pour  into  its 
exchequer. 

It  was,  however,  rather  for  the  sake  of  its  sur- 
roundings than  for  the  study  of  its  unfolding 
season,  that  we  had  come  there;  and  the  neigh- 
bouring country  offered  the  richest  return  for 
our  enterprise. 

f  52] 


NOHANT  TO  CLERMONT 

From  the  plain  of  the  Limagne  the  hills  slope 
up  behind  Vichy  in  a  succession  of  terraces  divid- 
ed by  streams  and  deeply-wooded  glens,  and 
connected  by  the  interlacing  of  admirable  roads 
that  civilises  the  remotest  rural  districts  of 
France.  Climbing  these  gradual  heights  to  the 
hill-village  of  Ferrieres,  we  had,  the  day  after 
our  arrival,  our  first  initiation  into  what  the  near 
future  held  for  us — a  glorious  vision,  across  the 
plain,  of  the  Monts  Dore  and  the  Monts  de 
Dome.  The  blue  mountain  haze  that  had  drawn 
us  steadily  southward,  from  our  first  glimpse  of 
it  on  the  heights  of  the  Berry,  now  resolved  itself 
into  a  range  of  wild  volcanic  forms,  some  curved 
like  the  bell-shaped  apses  of  the  churches  of 
Auvergne,  some  slenderly  cup-like,  and  showing 
the  hollow  rim  of  the  spent  crater;  all  fantastic, 
individual,  indescribably  differentiated  in  line 
and  colour  from  mountain  forms  of  less  violent 
origin.  And  between  them  and  us  lay  the  richest 
contrasting  landscape,  the  deep  meadows  and 
luxuriant  woodlands  of  the  Allier  vale,  with  here 
and  there  a  volcanic  knoll  lifting  on  its  crest  an 
old  town  or  a  Rhenish-looking  castle.  The  land- 
scape, thus  viewed,  presents  a  perplexing  mixture 

[53] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

of  suggestions,  recalling  now  the  brown  hill- 
villages  of  Umbria,  now  the  robber  castles  of  the 
Swiss  Rhineland ;  with  a  hint,  again,  of  the  Terra 
di  Lavore  in  its  bare  mountain  lines,  and  the 
prodigal  fertility  of  their  lower  slopes;  so  that 
one  felt  one's  self  moving  in  a  confusion  of  scenes 
romantically  combined,  as  in  the  foreground  of  a 
Claude  or  a  Wilson,  for  the  greater  pleasure  of 
the  eclectic  eye. 

The  only  landscape  that  seems  to  have  been 
excluded  from  the  composition  is  that  of  France ; 
all  through  Auvergne,  we  never  felt  ourselves  in 
France.  But  that  is,  of  course,  merely  because 
the  traveller's  France  is  apt  to  be  mainly  made 
up  of  bits  of  the  Ile-de-France  and  Normandy 
and  Brittany;  and  not  till  one  has  explored  the 
central  and  southwestern  provinces  does  one 
learn  of  the  countless  Frances  within  France,  and 
realise  that  one  may  find  one's  "Switzerland, 
one's  Italy"  without  crossing  the  Alps  to  reach 
them. 

We  had,  the  next  day,  a  closer  impression  of 
the  scene  we  had  looked  down  on  from  Ferrieres ; 
motoring  first  along  the  high  ridge  above  the 
Limagne  to  the  ancient  black  hill-town  of  Thiers, 

[54] 


NOHANT  TO  CLERMONT 

and  thence  descending  again  to  the  plain.  Our 
way  led  across  it,  by  the  charming  castled  town 
of  Pont-de-Chateau,  to  Clermont-Ferrand,  which 
spreads  its  swarthy  mass  at  the  base  of  the  Puy  de 
Dome — that  strangest,  sternest  of  cities,  all  built 
and  paved  in  the  black  volcanic  stone  of  Volvic, 
and  crowned  by  the  sinister  splendour  of  its  black 
cathedral.  It  was  Viollet-le-Duc  who  added  the 
west  front  and  towers  to  this  high  ancient  pile; 
and  for  once  his  rash  hand  was  so  happily  in- 
spired that,  at  the  first  glimpse  of  his  twin  spires 
soaring  above  the  roofs  of  Clermont,  one  forgives 
him — f  or  the  moment — the  wrong  he  did  to  Blois, 
to  Pierrefonds  and  Vezelay. 


[55] 


VI 

IN  AUVERGNE 

AT  last  we  were  really  in  Auvergne.  On 
our  balcony  at  Royat,  just  under  the 
flank  of  the  Puy  de  Dome,  we  found  ourselves 
in  close  communion  with  its  tossed  heights,  its 
black  towns,  its  threatening  castles.  And  Royat 
itself — even  the  dull  new  watering-place  quarter 
— is  extremely  characteristic  of  the  region :  hang- 
ing in  a  cleft  of  the  great  volcanic  upheaval,  with 
hotels,  villas,  gardens,  vineyards  clutching  pre- 
cariously at  every  ledge  and  fissure,  as  though 
just  arrested  in  their  descent  on  the  roofs  of 
Clermont. 

As  a  watering-place  Royat  is  not  an  orna- 
mental specimen  of  its  class;  and  it  has  the 
farther  disadvantage  of  being  connected  with 
Clermont  by  a  long  dusty  suburb,  noisy  with 
tram-cars ;  but  as  a  centre  for  excursions  it  offers 
its  good  hotels  and  "modern  conveniences"  at 

[56] 


IN  AUVERGNE 

the  precise  spot  most  favourable  to  the  motorist, 
who  may  radiate  from  it  upon  almost  every  centre 
of  interest  in  Auvergne,  and  return  at  night  to 
digestible  food  and  clean  beds — two  requisites  for 
which,  in  central  France,  one  is  often  doomed  to 
pine. 

Auvergne,  one  of  the  most  interesting,  and 
hitherto  almost  the  least  known,  of  the  old  French 
provinces,  offers  two  distinct  and  equally  striking 
sides  to  the  appreciative  traveller:  on  the  one 
hand,  its  remarkably  individual  church  architec- 
ture, and  on  the  other,  the  no  less  personal  char- 
acter of  its  landscape.  Almost  all  its  towns  are 
distinguished  by  one  of  those  ancient  swarthy 
churches,  with  western  narthex,  great  central 
tower,  and  curious  incrustations  of  polychrome 
lava,  which  marked,  in  Auvergne,  as  strongly  dis- 
tinctive an  architectural  impulse  as  flowered,  on 
a  vastly  larger  scale,  and  a  century  or  more  later, 
in  the  Gothic  of  the  He  de  France.  And  the 
towns  surrounding  these  churches,  on  the  crest 
or  flank  of  one  of  the  volcanic  eminences  spring- 
ing from  the  plain — the  towns  themselves,  with 
their  narrow  perpendicular  streets  and  tall  black 
houses,  are  so  darkly  individual,  so  plainly  akin 

[57] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

to  the  fierce  predatory  castles  on  the  neighbouring 
hills,  that  one  is  arrested  at  every  turn  by  the 
desire  to  follow  up  the  obscure  threads  of  history 
connecting  them  with  this  little-known  portion 
of  the  rich  French  past. 

But  to  the  traveller  restricted  by  time,  the 
other  side  of  the  picture — its  background,  rather, 
of  tormented  blue  peaks  and  wide-spread  forest 
— which  must  assert  itself,  at  all  seasons,  quite 
as  distinctively  as  the  historic  and  architectural 
character  of  the  towns,  is  likely,  in  May,  to  carry 
off  the  victory.  We  had  come,  at  any  rate,  with 
the  modest  purpose  of  taking  a  mere  bird's-eye 
view  of  the  region,  such  a  flight  across  the  scene 
as  draws  one  back,  later,  to  brood  and  hover; 
and  our  sight  of  the  landscape  from  the  Royat 
balcony  confirmed  us  in  the  resolve  to  throw  as 
sweeping  a  glance  as  possible,  and  defer  the  study 
of  details  to  our  next — our  already-projected! — 
visit. 

The  following  morning,  therefore,  we  set  out 
early  for  the  heart  of  the  Monts  Dore.  Our 
road  carried  us  southward,  along  a  series  of 
ridges  above  the  wide  Allier  vale,  and  then  up  and 
down,   over   wild   volcanic   hills,   now   densely 

[58] 


IN  AUVERGNE 

wooded,  now  desolately  bare.  We  were  on  the 
road  to  Issoire  and  La  Chaise  Dieu,  two  of  the 
most  notable  old  towns  of  southern  Auvergne; 
but,  in  pursuit  of  scenery,  we  reluctantly  turned 
off  at  the  village  of  Coudes,  at  the  mouth  of  a 
lateral  valley,  and  struck  up  toward  the  western 
passes  which  lead  to  the  Pic  de  Sancy. 

Some  miles  up  this  valley,  which  follows  the 
capricious  windings  of  the  Couzes,  lie  the  baths 
of  Saint  Nectaire-le-Bas,  romantically  planted  in 
a  narrow  defile,  beneath  the  pyramidal  Roman- 
esque church  which  the  higher-lying  original  vil- 
lage lifts  up  on  a  steep  splinter  of  rock.  The 
landscape  beyond  Saint  Nectaire  grows  more 
rugged  and  Alpine  in  character:  the  pastures 
have  a  Swiss  look,  and  the  shaggy  mountain-sides 
are  clothed  with  a  northern  growth  of  beech  and 
pine.  Presently,  at  a  turn  of  the  road,  we  came 
on  the  little  crater-lake  of  Chambon,  its  vivid 
blueness  set  in  the  greenest  of  meadows,  and 
overhung  by  the  dark  basalt  cliff  which  carries 
on  its  summit  the  fortified  castle  of  Murols. 
The  situation  of  Murols,  lifted  on  its  shaft  of  rock 
above  that  lonely  upland  valley,  is  in  itself  im- 
pressive enough  to  bring  out  the  full  value  of  such 

[59] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

romantic  suggestions  as  it  has  to  offer;  and  the 
monument  is  worthy  of  its  site.  It  is  in  fact  a 
very  noble  ruin,  raising  its  central  keep  above  two 
outer  circuits  of  battered  masonry,  the  ampler 
and  later  of  which  shows  the  classical  pilasters 
and  large  fenestration  of  what  must  have  been 
one  of  the  stateliest  specimens  of  the  last  stage 
of  French  feudal  architecture.  Though  the  guide- 
books record  a  mention  of  Murols  as  early  as  the 
thirteenth  century,  the  castle  now  standing  is  all 
of  later  date,  and  the  great  rectangular  exterior 
is  an  interesting  example  of  the  transitional 
period  when  Italian  palace  architecture  began  to 
be  grafted  on  the  rugged  stock  of  French  military 
construction. 

Just  beyond  the  lake  of  Chambon  the  road 
begins  to  mount  the  long  curves  of  the  Col  de 
Diane,  the  pass  which  leads  over  into  the  valley 
of  Mont  Dore.  As  we  rose  through  bleak  mead- 
ows and  patches  of  scant  woodland,  the  moun- 
tains of  Auvergne  unrolled  themselves  to  the 
east  in  one  of  those  lonely  tossing  expanses  of 
summit  and  ridge  and  chasm  that  suggest  the 
mysterious  undulations  of  some  uninhabited 
planet.     Though  the  Col  de  Diane  is  not  a  high 

[60] 


IN  AUVERGNE 

pass,  it  gives,  from  its  yoke,  a  strangely  memor- 
able impression  of  distance  and  mystery;  partly, 
perhaps,  because  in  that  desert  region  there  is 
neither  village  nor  house  to  break  the  labyrinth 
of  peaks;  but  chiefly  because  of  the  convulsed 
outlines  into  which  they  have  been  tossed  by 
subterranean  fires. 

A  cold  wind  swept  the  top  of  the  pass,  and 
snow  still  lay  under  the  rocks  by  the  roadside; 
so  that  it  was  cheering  to  the  spirits,  as  well  as  to 
the  eye,  when  we  presently  began  our  descent 
through  dark  pine  forests  into  the  vale  of  the 
Dordogne.  The  baths  of  Mont  Dore  lie  directly 
beneath  the  pass,  at  the  mouth  of  a  valley  hol- 
lowed out  of  the  side  of  the  Pic  de  Sancy,  the 
highest  peak  in  Auvergne.  In  spite  of  milder 
air  and  bright  spring  foliage  we  were  still  dis- 
tinctly in  high  places;  and  Mont  Dore  itself,  not 
yet  decked  for  the  entertainment  of  its  bathers, 
had  the  poverty-stricken  look  which  everywhere 
marks  the  real  mountain  village.  Later,  no 
doubt,  when  its  hotels  are  open,  and  its  scanty 
gardens  in  bloom,  it  takes  on  a  thin  veneer  of 
frivolity;  but  it  must  always  be  an  austere- 
looking  village,   with   its   ill-kept   cobble-stone 

[61] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

streets,  and  gaunt  stone  houses  grouped  against 
a  background  of  Alpine  pastures.  We  were  not 
sorry,  therefore,  that  its  few  restaurants  pre- 
sented barred  shutters  to  our  mid-day  hunger, 
and  that  we  were  obliged  to  follow  the  first  foot- 
steps of  the  infant  Dordogne  down  the  valley  to 
the  lower-lying  baths  of  Bourboule. 

The  Dordogne  is  a  child  of  lusty  growth,  and 
at  its  very  leap  from  the  cradle,  under  the  Pic  de 
Sancy,  it  rolls  a  fine  brown  torrent  beneath 
steeply  wooded  banks.  Its  course  led  us  rapidly 
down  the  mountain  glen  to  the  amiable  but  some- 
what characterless  little  watering-place  of  La 
Bourboule,  set  in  a  depression  of  the  hills,  with  a 
background  of  slopes  which,  in  summer,  might 
offer  fairly  pleasant  walks  between  one's  douches ; 
and  here,  at  a  fresh  white  hotel  with  an  affable 
landlady,  we  lunched  on  trout  that  must  have 
leapt  straight  from  the  Dordogne  into  the  frying- 
pan. 

After  luncheon  we  once  more  took  our  way 
along  the  lively  curves  of  the  river;  to  part  with 
them  at  last,  reluctantly,  a  few  miles  down  the 
valley,  and  strike  out  across  a  dull  plateau  to  the 
mountain    town  of    Laqueille — a   gaunt  wind- 

[62] 


IN  AUVERGNE 

beaten  place,  with  nothing  of  note  to  offer  except 
its  splendid  view  from  the  dizzy  verge  of  a  high 
cornice  which  overhangs  the  valley  running  south 
from  the  chain  of  the  Dome.  Beyond  Laqueille, 
again,  we  began  to  descend  by  long  windings; 
and  at  last,  turning  off  from  the  direct  road  to 
Royat,  we  engaged  ourselves  in  a  series  of  wooded 
gorges,  in  search  of  the  remote  village  of  Orcival. 

The  church  of  Orcival  is  one  of  the  most  noted 
of  that  strange  group  of  Auvergnat  churches  which 
some  students  of  French  Romanesque  are  dis- 
posed to  attribute,  not  only  to  one  brief  period  of 
time,  but  to  the  hand  of  one  architect ;  so  closely 
are  they  allied,  not  alone  in  plan  and  construc- 
tion, but  in  their  peculiar  and  original  decorative 
details.  We  had  resolved,  therefore,  not  to  re- 
turn to  Royat  without  a  sight  of  Orcival;  and 
spite  of  the  misleading  directions  plentifully  be- 
stowed on  us  by  the  way,  and  resulting  in  endless 
doublings  through  narrow  lonely  glens,  we 
finally  came,  in  the  neck  of  the  last  and  narrow- 
est, upon  a  huddled  group  of  stone  roofs  with  a 
church  rising  nobly  above  them. 

Here  it  was  at  last — and  our  first  glance  told 
us  how  well  worth  the  search  we  had  made  for  it. 

[63] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

But  a  second  made  evident  the  disturbing  fact 
that  a  cattle-fair  was  going  on  in  the  village ;  and 
though  this  is  not  an  unusual  event  in  French 
towns,  or  one  calculated,  in  general,  to  interfere 
with  the  movements  of  the  sightseer,  we  soon  saw 
that,  owing  to  the  peculiar  position  of  Orcival, 
which  is  jammed  into  the  head  of  its  glen  as  tight- 
ly as  a  cork  in  a  bottle,  the  occupation  of  the 
square  about  the  church  formed  a  complete  check 
to  circulation. 

And  the  square  was  fully  occupied:  it  pre- 
sented, as  we  descended  on  it,  an  agitated  surface 
of  blue  human  backs,  and  dun  and  white  bovine 
ones,  so  closely  and  inextricably  mixed  that  any 
impact  from  without  merely  sent  a  wave  across 
the  mass,  without  making  the  slightest  break  in 
its  substance.  On  its  edge,  therefore,  we  halted; 
the  church,  with  its  beautiful  rounded  chevet  and 
central  pyramid-tower,  islanded  a  few  yards 
away  across  a  horned  sea  which  divided  it  from 
us  as  hopelessly  as  Egypt  from  Israel;  and  the 
waves  of  the  sea  setting  toward  us  with  somewhat 
threatening  intent  at  the  least  sign  of  our  attempt- 
ing to  cross  it.  There  was  therefore  nothing  to 
be  done  but  to  own  ourselves  intruders,  and  defer 

[64] 


IN  AUVERGNE 

a  sight  of  Orcival  till  our  next  visit;  and  with 
much  backing  and  wriggling,  and  some  unfavour- 
able comment  on  the  part  of  the  opposition,  we 
effected  a  crestfallen  exit  from  that  interesting 
but  inhospitable  village. 

The  road  thence  to  Royat  climbs  over  the  long 
Col  de  Ceyssat,  close  under  the  southern  side  of 
the  Puy  de  Dome,  and  we  looked  up  longingly  at 
the  bare  top  of  the  mountain,  yearning  to  try  the 
ascent,  but  fearing  that  our  "  horse-power "  was 
not  pitched  to  such  heights.  That  adventure  too 
was  therefore  deferred  till  our  next  visit,  which 
every  renunciation  of  the  kind  was  helping  to 
bring  nearer  and  make  more  inevitable;  and  we 
pushed  on  to  Royat  across  the  plain  of  Laschamp, 
noted  in  the  records  of  motoring  as  the  starting- 
point  of  the  perilous  circuit  d'Auvergne. 


[65] 


VII 

ROYAT  TO   BOURGES 

THE  term  of  our  holiday  was  upon  us  and, 
stern  necessity  took  us  back,  the  next  day, 
to  Vichy.  We  followed,  this  time,  the  road  along 
the  western  side  of  the  Limagne,  passing  through 
the  old  towns  of  Riom  and  Aigueperse.  Riom, 
thanks  to  its  broad  boulevards  and  bright  open 
squares,  struck  us  as  the  most  cheerful  and  ani- 
mated place  we  had  seen  in  Auvergne ;  and  it  has, 
besides,  a  great  air  of  Renaissance  elegance, 
many  of  its  old  traceried  hotels  having  been  built 
in  the  sixteenth  century,  which  saw  the  chief  de- 
velopment of  the  town. 

Aigueperse,  on  the  contrary,  spite  of  its  situa- 
tion in  the  same  sunny  luxuriant  plain,  presents 
the  morose  aspect  of  the  typical  town  of  Au- 
vergne, without  many  compensating  merits,  save 
that  of  two  striking  pictures  of  the  Italian  school 
which  are  to  be  seen  in  its  modernised  cathedral. 

[.66] 


ROYAT  TO  BOURGES 

From  Aigueperse  our  road  struck  eastward  across 
the  Limagne  to  Gannat;  and  thence,  through 
pleasant  fields  and  woods,  we  returned  to  Vichy, 
on  the  opposite  edge  of  the  plain. 

We  started  early  the  next  morning  on  our 
journey  to  the  north,  for  our  slight  experience 
of  the  inns  of  central  France  made  us  anxious  to 
reach  Orleans  by  night.  Such  long  runs  cannot 
be  made  without  the  sacrifice  of  much  that 
charms  and  arrests  one  by  the  way;  and  this 
part  of  the  country  should  be  seen  at  leisure,  in 
the  long  summer  days,  when  the  hotels  are  less 
sepulchrally  damp,  and  when  one  can  remain 
late  out  of  doors,  instead  of  having  to  shiver 
through  the  evening  hours  around  a  smoky  oil- 
lamp,  in  a  room  which  will  not  bear  inspection 
even  by  that  inadequate  light. 

We  suffered,  I  remember,  many  pangs  by  the 
way;  and  not  least,  that  of  having  to  take  as  a 
mere  parenthesis  the  charmingly  complete  little 
town  of  La  Palisse  on  the  Bebre,  with  the  ruined 
ivied  castle  of  the  Comtes  de  Chabannes  over- 
hanging a  curve  of  the  river,  and  grouping  itself 
in  a  memorable  composition  with  the  picturesque 
houses  below  it. 

[67] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

Farther  north,  again,  Moulins  on  the  Allier 
inflicted  a  still  deeper  pang;  for  this  fine  old  town 
has  considerable  claims  to  distinction  besides 
the  great  triptych  that  made  its  name  known 
through  Europe  after  the  recent  exhibition  of 
French  Primitives  in  Paris.  The  Virgin  of  Mou- 
lins, gloriously  enthroned  in  the  cathedral  among 
her  soft-faced  Lombard  angels,  remains  un- 
doubtedly the  crowning  ornament  of  the  town, 
if  only  on  account  of  the  problem  which  she  holds 
out,  so  inscrutably,  to  explorers  of  the  baffling 
annals  of  early  French  art.  But  aside  from  this 
preeminent  possession,  and  the  interest  of  several 
minor  relics,  Moulins  has  the  attraction  of  its 
own  amiable  and  distinguished  physiognomy. 
With  its  streets  of  light-coloured  stone,  its  hand- 
some eighteenth-century  hotels  and  broad  well- 
paved  courSy  it  seemed,  after  the  grim  black 
towns  of  the  south,  a  singularly  open  and  cheerful 
place;  and  one  was  conscious,  behind  the  hand- 
some stone  gateways  and  balconied  facades,  of 
the  existence  of  old  panelled  drawing-rooms  with 
pastel  portraits  and  faded  tapestry  furniture. 

The  approach  to  Nevers,  the  old  capital  of  the 
Nivernais,  carried  us  abruptly  back  to  the  Middle 

[68] 


ROYAT  TO  BOURGES 

Ages,  but  to  an  exuberant  northern  medievalism 
far  removed  from  the  Gallo-Roman  tradition  of 
central  France.  The  cathedral  of  Nevers,  with 
its  ornate  portals  and  fantastically  decorated 
clock-tower,  has,  in  the  old  ducal  palace  across 
the  square,  a  rival  more  than  capable  of  meeting 
its  challenge  on  equal  grounds:  a  building  of 
really  gallant  exterior,  with  fine  angle  towers, 
and  within,  a  great  staircase  commemorating  in 
luxuriant  sculpture  the  legendary  beginnings  of 
that  ancient  house  of  Cleves  which,  in  the  fif- 
teenth century,  allied  itself  by  marriage  with  the 
dukes  of  Burgundy. 

At  Nevers  we  found  ourselves  once  more  on 
the  Loire;  but  only  to  break  from  it  again  in  a 
long  dash  across  country  to  Bourges.  At  this 
point  we  left  behind  us  the  charming  diversified 
scenery  which  had  accompanied  us  to  the  bor- 
ders of  the  Loire,  and  entered  on  a  region  of  low 
monotonous  undulations,  flattening  out  gradu- 
ally into  the  vast  wheat-fields  about  Bourges. 
But  who  would  wish  any  other  setting  for  that 
memorable  silhouette,  throned,  from  whichever 
point  of  the  compass  one  approaches  it,  in  such 
proud  isolation  above  the  plain?     One  forgets 

[69] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

even,  in  a  distant  view  of  Bourges,  that  nature  has 
helped,  by  an  opportune  rise  of  the  ground,  to 
lift  the  cathedral  to  its  singular  eminence:  the 
hill,  and  the  town  upon  it,  seem  so  merely  the 
unremarked  pedestal  of  the  monument.  It  is  not 
till  one  climbs  the  steep  street  leading  up  from 
the  Place  Saint  Bonnet  that  one  realises  the  pe- 
culiar topographical  advantages  of  such  a  site; 
advantages  which  perhaps  partly  account  for  the 
overwhelming  and  not  quite  explicable  effect  of  a 
first  sight  of  the  cathedral. 

Even  now,  on  a  second  visit,  with  the  great 
monuments  of  the  lie  de  France  fresh  in  mem- 
ory, we  felt  the  same  effect,  and  the  same  difficul- 
ty in  running  it  down,  in  differentiating  it  from 
the  richer,  yet  perhaps  less  deeply  Gothic  im- 
pression produced  by  the  rival  churches  of  the 
north.  For,  begin  as  one  will  by  admitting,  by 
insisting  upon,  the  defects  of  Bourges — its  irregu- 
lar inharmonious  facade,  its  thin  piers,  its  mean 
outer  aisles — one  yet  ends  in  a  state  where 
criticism  perforce  yields  to  sensation,  where  one 
surrenders  one's  self  wholly  to  the  spell  of  its 
spiritual  suggestion.  Certainly  it  would  be  hard 
to  put  a  finger,  either  within  or  without,  on  the 


Ul 

n 

* 

o 

h- 

H 

<o 

ROYAT  TO  BOURGES 

specific  tangible  cause  of  this  feeling.  Is  it  to  be 
found  in  the  extraordinary  beauty  of  the  five 
western  portals,  so  crowded  with  noble  and 
pathetic  imagery  and  delicate  ornamental  de- 
tail? But  the  doors  of  Chartres  surpass  even 
these!  Is  it  then,  if  one  looks  within,  the  rich 
blue  and  red  of  its  dense  ancient  glass?  But 
Chartres,  again,  has  finer  glass  of  that  unmatched 
period.  Is  it  the  long  clear  sweep  of  the  nave 
and  aisles,  uninterrupted  by  the  cross-lines  of 
transept  or  chancel-screen?  But  if  one  recalls 
the  wonderful  convolutions  of  the  ambulatory  of 
Canterbury,  one  has  to  confess  that  Gothic  art — 
even  in  its  conventionalised  English  form — has 
created  curves  of  greater  poetry  and  mystery, 
produced  a  more  thrilling  sense  of  shadowy  con- 
secrated distances.  Perhaps  the  spell  of  Bourges 
resides  in  a  fortunate  accidental  mingling  of 
many  of  the  qualities  that  predominate  in  this  or 
that  more  perfect  structure — in  the  mixing  of  the 
ingredients  so  that  there  rises  from  them,  as  one 
stands  in  one  of  the  lofty  inner  aisles,  with  one's 
face  toward  the  choir,  that  breath  of  mystical 
devotion  which  issues  from  the  very  heart  of 
mediaeval  Christianity. 

[71] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

"With  this  sweetness,'*  wrote  Saint  Theresa,  of 
the  Prayer  of  Quiet,  "the  whole  inner  and  outer 
man  seems  to  be  delighted,  as  though  some  de- 
licious ointment  were  poured  into  the  soul  like  an 
exquisite  perfume  ...  as  if  we  suddenly  came 
to  a  place  where  it  is  exhaled,  not  only  from  one, 
but  from  many  things;  and  we  know  not  what 
it  is,  or  from  which  one  of  them  it  comes,  but  they 
all  penetrate  us ".  .  .  If  Amiens,  in  its  har- 
mony of  conception  and  vigour  of  execution, 
seems  to  embody  the  developing  will-power  of  a 
people  passionate  in  belief,  and  indomitable  in 
the  concrete  expression  of  their  creed,  here  at 
Bourges  one  feels  that  other,  less  expressible 
side  of  the  great  ruling  influence  of  the  Middle 
Ages — the  power  that  willed  mighty  monuments 
and  built  them,  yet  also,  even  in  its  moments  of 
most  brutal  material  ascendancy,  created  the 
other  houses,  not  built  with  hands,  where  the 
spirits  of  the  saints  might  dwell. 


[72] 


PART  II 


PARIS   TO    POITIERS 


SPRING  again,  and  the  long  white  road  un- 
rolling itself  southward  from  Paris.     How 
could  one  resist  the  call  ? 

We  answered  it  on  the  blandest  of  late  March 
mornings,  all  April  in  the  air,  and  the  Seine 
fringing  itself  with  a  mist  of  yellowish  willows  as 
we  rose  over  it,  climbing  the  hill  to  Ville  d'Avray. 
Spring  comes  soberly,  inaudibly  as  it  were,  in 
these  temperate  European  lands,  where  the  grass 
holds  its  green  all  winter,  and  the  foliage  of  ivy, 
laurel,  holly,  and  countless  other  evergreen 
shrubs,  links  the  lifeless  to  the  living  months. 
But  the  mere  act  of  climbing  that  southern  road 
above  the  Seine  meadows  seemed  as  definite  as 
the  turning  of  a  leaf — the  passing  from  a  black- 

[73] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

and- white  page  to  one  illuminated.  And  every 
day  now  would  turn  a  brighter  page  for  us. 

Goethe  has  a  charming  verse,  descriptive,  it  is 
supposed,  of  his  first  meeting  with  Christiane 
Vulpius:  "Aimlessly  I  strayed  through  the 
wood,  having  it  in  my  mind  to  seek  nothing." 

Such,  precisely,  was  our  state  of  mind  on  that 
first  day's  run.  We  were  simply  pushing  south 
toward  the  Berry,  through  a  more  or  less  familiar 
country,  and  the  real  journey  was  to  begin  for 
us  on  the  morrow,  with  the  run  from  Chateau- 
roux  to  Poitiers.  But  we  reckoned  without  our 
France!  It  is  easy  enough,  glancing  down  the 
long  page  of  the  Guide  Continental,  to  slip  by 
such  names  as  Versailles,  Rambouillet,  Chartres 
and  Valencay,  in  one's  dash  for  the  objective 
point;  but  there  is  no  slipping  by  them  in  the 
motor,  they  lurk  there  in  one's  path,  throwing  out 
great  loops  of  persuasion,  arresting  one's  flight, 
complicating  one's  impressions,  oppressing,  be- 
wildering one  with  the  renewed,  half-forgotten 
sense  of  the  hoarded  richness  of  France. 

Versailles  first,  unfolding  the  pillared  expanse 
of  its  north  f  acade  to  vast  empty  perspectives  of 
radiating  avenues;   then  Rambouillet,  low  in  a 

[74] 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

damp  little  park,  with  statues  along  green  canals, 
and  a  look,  this  moist  March  weather,  of  being 
somewhat  below  sea-level;  then  Maintenon,  its 
rich  red-purple  walls  and  delicate  stone  ornament 
reflected  in  the  moat  dividing  it  from  the  village 
street.  Both  Rambouillet  and  Maintenon  are 
characteristically  French  in  their  way  of  keeping 
company  with  their  villages.  Rambouillet,  in- 
deed, is  slightly  screened  by  a  tall  gate,  a  wall 
and  trees;  but  Maintenon's  warm  red  turrets 
look  across  the  moat,  straight  into  the  windows  of 
the  opposite  houses,  with  the  simple  familiarity 
of  a  time  when  class  distinctions  were  too  fixed 
to  need  emphasising. 

Our  third  chateau,  Valencay — which,  for  com- 
parison's sake,  one  may  couple  with  the  others 
though  it  lies  far  south  of  Blois — Valencay  bears 
itself  with  greater  aloofness,  bidding  the  town 
"keep  its  distance"  down  the  hill  on  which  the 
great  house  lifts  its  heavy  angle-towers  and 
flattened  domes.  A  huge  cliff-like  wall,  en- 
closing the  whole  southern  flank  of  the  hill,  sup- 
ports the  terraced  gardens  before  the  chateau, 
which  to  the  north  is  divided  from  the  road  by  a 
vast  cour  d'honneur  with  a  monumental  grille  and 

[75] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

gateway.     The  impression  is  grander  yet  less 
noble. 

But  France  is  never  long  content  to  repeat  her 
effects;  and  between  Maintenon  and  Valencay 
she  puts  Chartres  and  Blois.  Ah,  these  grey  old 
cathedral  towns  with  their  narrow  clean  streets 
widening  to  a  central  place — at  Chartres  a  beau- 
tiful oval,  like  the  market-place  in  an  eighteenth- 
century  print — with  their  clipped  lime-walks, 
high  garden  walls,  Balzacian  gables  looking  out 
on  sunless  lanes  under  the  flanks  of  the  granite 
giant!  Save  in  the  church  itself,  how  frugally 
all  the  effects  are  produced — with  how  sober  a 
use  of  greys  and  blacks,  and  pale  high  lights,  as 
in  some  Van  der  Meer  interior;  yet  how  intense 
a  suggestion  of  thrifty  compact  traditional  life 
one  gets  from  the  low  house-fronts,  the  barred 
gates,  the  glimpses  of  clean  bare  courts,  the  calm 
yet  quick  faces  in  the  doorways!  From  these 
faces  again  one  gets  the  same  impression  of  re- 
markable effects  produced  by  the  discreetest 
means.  The  French  physiognomy  if  not  vividly 
beautiful  is  vividly  intelligent;  but  the  long 
practice  of  manners  has  so  veiled  its  keenness 
with  refinement  as  to  produce  a  blending  of 

[76] 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

vivacity  and  good  temper  nowhere  else  to  be 
matched.  And  in  looking  at  it  one  feels  once 
more,  as  one  so  often  feels  in  trying  to  estimate 
French  architecture  or  the  French  landscape, 
how  much  of  her  total  effect  France  achieves 
by  elimination.  If  marked  beauty  be  absent 
from  the  French  face,  how  much  more  is  marked 
dulness,  marked  brutality,  the  lumpishness  of 
the  clumsily  made  and  the  unfinished!  As  a 
mere  piece  of  workmanship,  of  finish,  the  French 
provincial  face — the  peasant's  face,  even — often 
has  the  same  kind  of  interest  as  a  work  of  art. 

One  gets,  after  repeated  visits  to  the  "show" 
towns  of  France,  to  feel  these  minor  character- 
istics, the  incidental  graces  of  the  foreground,  al- 
most to  the  exclusion  of  the  great  official  spectacle 
in  the  centre  of  the  picture;  so  that  while  the 
first  image  of  Bourges  or  Chartres  is  that  of  a 
cathedral  surrounded  by  a  blur,  later  memories 
of  the  same  places  present  a  vividly  individual 
town,  with  doorways,  street-corners,  faces  in- 
tensely remembered,  and  in  the  centre  a  great 
cloudy  Gothic  splendour. 

At  Chartres  the  cloudy  splendour  is  shot 
through  with  such  effulgence  of  colour  that  its 

[77] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

vision,  evoked  by  memory,  seems  to  beat  with 
a  fiery  life  of  its  own,  as  though  red  blood  ran  in 
its  stone  veins.  It  is  this  suffusion  of  heat  and 
radiance  that  chiefly,  to  the  untechnical,  distin- 
guishes it  from  the  other  great  Gothic  interiors. 
In  all  the  rest,  colour,  if  it  exists  at  all,  burns  in 
scattered  unquiet  patches,  between  wastes  of 
shadowy  grey  stone  and  the  wan  pallor  of  later 
painted  glass;  but  at  Chartres  those  quivering 
waves  of  unearthly  red  and  blue  flow  into  and 
repeat  each  other  in  rivers  of  light,  from  their 
source  in  the  great  western  rose,  down  the  length 
of  the  vast  aisles  and  clerestory,  till  they  are 
gathered  up  at  last  into  the  mystical  heart  of  the 
apse. 

A  short  afternoon's  run  carried  us  through 
dullish  country  from  Chartres  to  Blois,  which  we 
reached  at  the  fortunate  hour  when  sunset  bur- 
nishes the  great  curves  of  the  Loire  and  lays  a 
plum-coloured  bloom  on  the  slate  roofs  over- 
lapping, scale-like,  the  slope  below  the  castle. 
There  are  few  finer  roof-views  than  this  from  the 
wall  at  Blois :  the  blue  sweep  of  gables  and  ridge- 
lines  billowing  up  here  and  there  into  a  church 
tower  with  its  clocheton  mailed  in  slate,  or  break- 

[78] 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

ing  to  let  through  the  glimpse  of  a  carved  facade, 
or  the  blossoming  depths  of  a  hanging  garden; 
but  perhaps  only  the  eye  subdued  to  tin  house- 
tops and  iron  chimney-pots  can  feel  the  full 
poetry  of  old  roofs. 

Coming  back  to  the  Berry  six  weeks  earlier 
than  on  our  last  year's  visit,  we  saw  how  much 
its  wide  landscape  needs  the  relief  and  modelling 
given  by  the  varied  foliage  of  May.  Between 
bare  woods  and  scarcely  budded  hedges  the  great 
meadows  looked  bleak  and  monotonous;  and 
only  the  village  gardens  hung  out  a  visible 
promise  of  spring.  But  in  the  sheltered  en- 
closure at  Nohant,  spring  seemed  much  nearer; 
at  hand  already  in  clumps  of  snow-drops  and 
violets  loosening  the  soil,  in  young  red  leaves  on 
the  rose-standards,  and  the  twitter  of  birds  in 
the  heavy  black-fruited  ivy  of  the  graveyard 
wall.  A  gate  leads  from  the  garden  into  the 
corner  of  the  grave-yard  where  George  Sand  and 
her  children  lie  under  an  ancient  yew.  Feudal 
even  in  burial,  they  are  walled  off  from  the  vil- 
lage dead,  and  the  tombstone  of  Maurice  Sand, 
as  well  as  the  monstrous  stone  chest  over  his 
mother's  grave,  bears  the  name  of  Dudevant  and 

[79] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

asserts  a  claim  to  the  barony.  Strange  inconse- 
quence of  human  desires,  that  the  woman  who 
had  made  her  pseudonym  illustrious  enough  to 
have  it  assumed  by  her  whole  family  should  cling 
in  death  to  the  obscure  name  of  a  repudiated 
husband;  more  inconsequent  still  that  the  de- 
scendant of  kings,  and  the  priestess  of  democracy 
and  Fourierism,  should  insist  on  a  right  to  the 
petty  title  which  was  never  hers,  since  it  was  never 
Dudevant's  to  give!  On  the  whole,  the  grave- 
stones at  Nohant  are  disillusioning;  except  in- 
deed that  of  the  wretched  Solange,  with  its  four 
tragic  words :    La  mere  de  Jeanne. 

But  the  real  meaning  of  the  place  must  be 
sought  close  by,  behind  the  row  of  tall  windows 
opening  on  the  tangled  mossy  garden.  They 
lead,  these  windows,  straight  into  the  life  of 
George  Sand:  into  the  big  cool  dining-room, 
with  its  flagged  floor  and  simple  white-panelled 
walls,  and  the  salon  adjoining:  the  salon,  alas, 
so  radically  remodelled  in  the  unhappy  mid- 
century  period  of  wall-papers,  stuffed  furniture 
and  centre  table,  that  one  seeks  in  vain  for  a 
trace  of  the  original  chatelaine  of  Nohant — that 
high-spirited,  high-heeled  old  Madame  Dupin 

[80] 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

who  still  haunts  the  panelled  dining-room  and 
the  box-edged  garden.  Yet  the  salon  has  its 
special  story  to  tell,  for  in  George  Sand's  culmi- 
nating time  just  such  a  long  table  with  fringed 
cover  and  encircling  arm-chairs  formed  the  cen- 
tre of  French  indoor  life.  About  this  elongated 
board  sat  the  great  woman's  illustrious  visitors, 
prolonging,  as  at  a  mental  table  d'hote,  that  in- 
terminable dinner-talk  which  still  strikes  the 
hurried  Anglo-Saxon  as  the  typical  expression  of 
French  sociability;  and  here  the  different  arts 
of  the  household  were  practised — the  painting, 
carving  and  fine  needle-work  which  a  stronger- 
eyed  generation  managed  to  carry  on  by  the  light 
of  a  single  lamp.  Here,  one  likes  especially  to 
fancy,  Maurice  Sand  exercised  his  chisel  on  the 
famous  marionettes  for  the  little  theatre,  while 
his  mother,  fitting  their  costumes  with  skilful 
fingers,  listened,  silent  comme  une  bete,  to  the 
dissertations  of  Gautier,  Flaubert  or  Dumas. 
The  earlier  life  of  the  house  still  speaks,  more- 
over, from  the  walls  of  the  drawing-room,  with 
the  voice  of  jealously  treasured  ancestral  por- 
traits— pictures  of  the  demoiselles  Verrieres,  of 
the  great  Marshal  and  the  beautiful  Aurora — 

[81] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

strange  memorials  of  a  past  which  explains  so 
much  in  the  history  of  George  Sand,  even  to  the 
tempestuous  face  of  Solange  Clesinger,  looking 
darkly  across  the  room  at  her  simpering  unre- 
morseful  progenitors. 

Our  guide,  a  close-capped  brown-and-ruddy 
bonne,  led  us  next,  by  circuitous  passages,  to  the 
most  interesting  corner  of  the  house:  the  little 
theatre  contrived  with  artless  ingenuity  out  of 
what  might  have  been  a  store-room  or  wine- 
cellar.  One  should  rather  say  the  little  theatres, 
however,  for  the  mistress  of  revels  had  managed 
to  crowd  two  stages  into  the  limited  space  at  her 
disposal;  one,  to  the  left,  an  actual  scene,  with 
"life-size"  scenery  for  real  actors,  the  other, 
facing  the  entrance-door,  the  more  celebrated 
marionette  theatre,  raised  a  few  feet  from  the 
floor,  with  miniature  proscenium  arch  and  cur- 
tain; just  such  a  Puppen-theatre  as  Wilhelm 
Meister  described  to  Marianne,  with  a  prolixity 
which  caused  that  amiable  but  flighty  young 
woman  to  fall  asleep. 

Between  the  two  stages  about  twenty  specta- 
tors might  have  found  seats  behind  the  front  row 
of  hard  wooden  benches  reserved  for  the  chate- 

[82] 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

laine  and  her  most  distinguished  guests.  A 
clean  emptiness  now  pervades  this  temple  of  the 
arts:  an  emptiness  made  actually  pathetic  by 
the  presence,  on  shelves  at  the  back  of  the  room, 
of  the  whole  troupe  of  marionettes,  brushed, 
spotless,  well  cared  for,  and  waiting  only  a  touch 
on  their  wires  to  spring  into  life  and  populate 
their  little  stage.  There  they  stand  in  wistful 
rows,  the  duenna,  the  Chimene,  the  grande 
coquette.  Pantaloon,  Columbine  and  Harlequin, 
Neapolitan  fishers,  odalisques  and  peasants, 
brigands  and  soldiers  of  the  guard;  all  carved 
with  a  certain  rude  vivacity,  and  dressed,  in- 
geniously and  thriftily,  by  the  indefatigable 
fingers  which  drove  the  quill  all  night  up- 
stairs. 

It  brought  one  close  to  that  strange  unfathom- 
able life,  which  only  at  Nohant  grows  clear, 
shows  bottom,  as  it  were;  closer  still  to  be  told  by 
the  red-brown  bonne  that  "Monsieur  Maurice" 
had  modelled  many  of  his  humorous  peasant- 
types  on  "les  gens  du  pays";  closest  of  all  when 
she  added,  in  answer  to  a  question  as  to  whether 
Madame  Sand  had  really  made  the  little  frocks 
herself:     "Oh,  yes,  I  remember  seeing  her  at 

[83] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

work  on  them,  and  helping  her  with  it.     I  was 
twelve  years  old  when  she  died." 

Here,  then,  was  an  actual  bit  of  the  Nohant 
tradition,  before  us  in  robust  and  lively  middle 
age :  one  of  the  berrichonnes  whom  George  Sand 
loved  and  celebrated,  and  who  loved  and  served 
her  in  return.  For  a  moment  it  brought  Nohant 
within  touch;  yet  the  final  effect  of  the  contact, 
as  one  reflected  on  the  vanished  enthusiasms  and 
ideals  that  George  Sand's  name  revives,  was  the 
sense  that  the  world  of  beliefs  and  ideas  has 
seldom  travelled  so  fast  and  far  as  in  the  years 
between  "Indiana"  and  to-day. 

From  La  Chatre,  just  south  of  Nohant,  we 
turned  due  west  along  the  valley  of  the  Creuse, 
through  a  country  possessing  some  local  fame  for 
picturesqueness,  but  which  struck  us,  in  its  early 
spring  nudity,  as  somewhat  parched  and  chalky- 
looking,  without  sufficient  woodland  to  drape  its 
angles.  It  makes  up,  however,  in  architectural 
interest  for  what  its  landscape  lacks,  and  not 
many  miles  beyond  La  Chatre  the  otherwise 
featureless  little  town  of  Neuvy-Saint-Sepulcre 
presents   one  feature   of   unusual   prominence. 

[84] 


NEUVY  SAINT-SEPULCRE:     CHURCH  OF  THE   PRECIOUS    BLOOD 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

This  is  the  ancient  round  church  from  which  the 
place  is  named :  one  of  those  copies  of  the  church 
of  the  Holy  Sepulchre  at  Jerusalem  with  which 
the  returning  crusader  dotted  western  Europe. 
Aside  from  their  intrinsic  interest,  these  "sepul- 
chre" churches  have  gained  importance  from  the 
fact  that  but  three  or  four  are  still  extant.  The 
most  typical,  that  of  Saint  Benigne  at  Dijon, 
has  been  levelled  to  a  mere  crypt,  and  that  of 
Cambrige  deviates  from  the  type  by  reason  of  its 
octagonal  dome;  so  that  the  church  of  Neuvy  is 
of  quite  pre-eminent  interest.  A  late  Roman- 
esque nave — itself  sufficiently  venerable  looking 
to  stir  the  imagination  in  its  own  behalf — was  ap- 
pended in  the  early  thirteenth  century  to  the 
circular  shrine;  but  the  latter  still  presents  to  the 
dull  old  street  its  unbroken  cylindrical  wall,  built 
close  on  a  thousand  years  ago,  and  surmounted, 
some  ninety  years  later,  by  a  second  story  with  a 
Romanesque  exterior  arcade.  At  this  stage,  how- 
ever, one  is  left  to  conjecture,  with  the  aid  of 
expert  suggestion,  what  manner  of  covering  the 
building  was  meant  to  have.  The  present  small 
dome,  perched  on  the  inner  drum  of  the  upper 
gallery,  is  an  expedient  of  the  most  obvious  sort; 

[85] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

and  the  archaeologists  have  inferred  that  the  thin- 
ness of  this  drum  may  have  made  a  more  ade- 
quate form  of  roofing  impossible. 

To  the  idle  sight-seer,  at  any  rate,  the  interior 
of  the  church  is  much  more  suggestive  than  its 
bare  outer  shell.  We  were  happy  enough  to 
enter  it  toward  sunset,  when  dusk  had  gathered 
under  the  heavy  encircling  columns,  and  lights 
twinkled  yellow  on  the  central  altar  which  has  so 
regrettably  replaced  the  "Grotto  of  the  Sepul- 
chre." It  was  our  added  good  fortune  that  a 
small  train  of  the  faithful,  headed  by  a  red- 
cassocked  verger  and  a  priest  with  a  benignant 
Massillon-like  head,  were  just  making  a  circuit 
of  the  stations  of  the  cross  affixed  to  the  walls 
of  the  aisle;  and  as  we  stood  withdrawn,  while 
the  procession  wound  its  way  between  shining 
altar  and  shadowy  columns,  some  of  the  faces  of 
the  peasants  seemed  to  carry  us  as  far  into  the 
past  as  the  strange  symbolic  masks  on  the  capitals 
above  their  heads. 

But  what  carries  one  farthest  of  all  is  perhaps 
the  fact,  well  known  to  modern  archaeology,  that 
the  original  church  built  by  Constantine  over  the 
grotto-tomb  of  Christ  was  not  a  round  temple  at 

[86] 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

all,  but  a  vast  basilica  with  semi-circular  apse. 
The  Persians  destroyed  this  building  in  the 
seventh  century,  and  the  Christians  who  under- 
took to  restore  it  could  do  no  more  than  round  the 
circle  of  the  apse,  thus  at  least  covering  over  the 
sacred  tomb  in  the  centre.  So  swift  was  the  suc- 
cession of  demolition  and  reconstruction  in  that 
confused  and  clashing  age,  so  vague  and  soon 
obliterated  were  the  records  of  each  previous 
rule,  that  when  the  crusaders  came  they  found 
no  memory  of  this  earlier  transformation,  and 
carried  back  with  them  that  model  of  the  round 
temple  which  was  henceforth  to  stand,  through- 
out western  Europe,  as  the  venerated  image  of 
the  primitive  church  of  Jerusalem. 

Too  much  lingering  in  this  precious  little 
building  brought  twilight  on  us  soon  after  we 
joined  the  Creuse  at  Argenton ;  and  when  we  left 
it  again  at  Le  Blanc  lights  were  in  the  windows, 
and  the  rest  of  our  run  to  Poitiers  was  a  ghostly 
flight  through  a  moon-washed  landscape,  with 
here  and  there  a  church  tower  looming  in  the 
dimness,  or  a  heap  of  ruined  walls  rising  myste- 
riously above  the  white  bend  of  a  river.  We  suf- 
fered a  peculiar  pang  when  a  long-roofed  pile 

[87] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

towering  overhead  told  us  that  we  were  passing 
the  great  Benedictine  abbey  of  Saint  Savin,  with 
its  matchless  lining  of  frescoes;  but  a  certain 
mental  satiety  urged  us  on  to  Poitiers. 

Travellers  accustomed  to  the  marked  silhouette 
of  Italian  cities — to  their  immediate  proffer  of 
the  picturesque  impression — often  find  the  old 
French  provincial  towns  lacking  in  physiognomy. 
Each  Italian  city,  whether  of  the  mountain  or 
the  plain,  has  an  outline  easily  recognisable  after 
individual  details  have  faded,  and  it  is,  obviously, 
much  easier  to  keep  separate  one's  memories  of 
Siena  and  Orvieto  than  of  Bourges  and  Chartres. 
Perhaps,  therefore,  the  few  French  towns  with 
definite  physiognomies  seem  the  more  definite 
from  their  infrequency;  and  Poitiers  is  foremost 
in  this  distinguished  group. 

Not  that  it  offers  the  distinctive  galbe  of  such 
bold  hill-towns  as  Angouleme  or  Laon.  Though 
a  hill-town  in  fact,  it  somehow  makes  next  to 
nothing  of  this  advantage,  and  the  late  Mr.  Free- 
man was  justified  in  grumbling  at  the  lack  of 
character  in  its  sky-line.  That  character  reveals 
itself,  in  fact,  not  in  any  picturesqueness  of  dis- 
tant effect — in  no  such  far-seen  crown  as  the 

[88] 


NEUVY  SAINT-SE>ULCRE:     INTERIOR  OF  THE  CHURCH 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

towers  of  Laon  or  the  domes  of  Perigueux — but 
in  the  homogeneous  interest  of  the  old  buildings 
within  the  city:  the  way  they  carry  on  its  packed 
romantic  history  like  the  consecutive  pages  of  a 
richly  illuminated  chronicle.  The  illustration  of 
that  history  begins  with  the  strange  little  "  tem- 
ple "  of  Saint  John,  a  baptistery  of  the  fourth 
century,  and  accounted  the  earliest  Christian 
building  in  France — though  this  applies  only  to 
the  lower  story  (now  virtually  the  crypt),  the 
upper  having  been  added  some  three  hundred 
years  later,  when  baptism  by  aspersion  had  re- 
placed the  primitive  plunge.  Unhappily  the 
ancient  temple  has  suffered  the  lot  of  the  too- 
highly  treasured  relic,  and  fenced  about,  restored, 
and  converted  into  a  dry  little  museum,  has  lost 
all  that  colour  and  pathos  of  extreme  age  that 
make  the  charm  of  humbler  monuments. 

This  charm,  in  addition  to  many  others,  still 
clings  to  the  expressive  west  front  of  Notre 
Dame  la  Grande,  the  incomparable  little  Roman- 
esque church  holding  the  centre  of  the  market- 
place. Built  of  a  dark  grey  stone  which  has 
taken  on — and  been  suffered  to  retain — a  bloom 
of  golden  lichen  like  the  trace  of  ancient  weather- 

[89] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

worn  gilding,  it  breaks,  at  the  spring  of  its  portal- 
arches,  into  a  profusion  of  serried,  overlapping 
sculpture,  which  rises  tier  by  tier  to  the  splendid 
Christ  Triumphant  of  the  crowning  gable,  yet 
never  once  crowds  out  and  smothers  the  struct- 
ural composition,  as  Gothic  ornament,  in  its 
most  exuberant  phase,  was  wont  to  do.  Through 
all  its  profusion  of  statuary  and  ornamental 
carving,  the  front  of  Notre  Dame  preserves  that 
subordination  to  classical  composition  that  marks 
the  Romanesque  of  southern  France;  but  be- 
tween the  arches,  in  the  great  spandrils  of  the 
doorways,  up  to  the  typically  Poitevin  scales  of 
the  beautiful  arcaded  angle  turrets,  what  richness 
of  detail,  what  splendid  play  of  fancy! 

After  such  completeness  of  beauty  as  this  little 
church  presents — for  its  nave  and  transept  tower 
are  no  less  admirable  than  the  more  striking  front 
— even  such  other  monuments  as  Poitiers  has  to 
offer  must  suffer  slightly  by  comparison.  Saint 
Hilaire  le  Grand,  that  notable  eleventh-century 
church,  with  its  triple  aisles  and  its  nave  roofed 
by  cupolas,  and  the  lower-lying  temple  of  Sainte 
Radegonde,  which  dates  from  the  Merovingian 
queen  from  whom  it  takes  its  name,  have  both 

[90] 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

suffered  such  repeated  alterations  that  neither 
carries  the  imagination  back  with  as  direct  a 
flight  as  the  slightly  less  ancient  Notre  Dame; 
and  the  cathedral  itself,  which  one  somehow 
comes  to  last  in  an  enumeration  of  the  Poitiers 
churches,  is  a  singularly  charmless  building. 
Built  in  the  twelfth  century,  by  Queen  Eleanor 
of  Guyenne,  at  the  interesting  moment  of  transi- 
tion from  the  round  to  the  pointed  arch,  and 
completed  later  by  a  wide-sprawling  Gothic 
front,  it  gropes  after  and  fails  of  its  effect  both 
without  and  within.  Yet  it  has  one  memorable 
possession  in  its  thirteenth-century  choir-stalls, 
almost  alone  of  that  date  in  France — tall  severe 
seats,  their  backs  formed  by  pointed  arches  with 
delicate  low-relief  carvings  between  the  spandrils. 
There  is,  in  especial,  one  small  bat,  with  out- 
spread web-like  wings,  so  exquisitely  fitted  into 
its  allotted  space,  and  with  such  delicacy  of  ob- 
servation shown  in  the  modelling  of  its  little  half- 
human  face,  that  it  remains  in  memory  as  having 
the  permanence  of  something  classical,  outside 
of  dates  and  styles. 

Having  lingered  over  these  things,  and  taken 
in  by  the  way  an  impression  of  the  confused 

[91] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

and  rambling  ducal  palace,  with  its  magnificent 
grande  salle  completed  and  adorned  by  Jean  de 
Berry,  we  began  to  think  remorsefully  of  the 
wonders  we  had  missed  on  our  run  from  Le 
Blanc  to  Poitiers.  We  could  not  retrace  the 
whole  distance;  but  at  least  we  could  return  to 
the  curious  little  town  of  Chauvigny,  of  which  we 
had  caught  a  tantalising  glimpse  above  a  moon- 
lit curve  of  the  Vienne. 

We  found  it,  by  day,  no  less  suggestive,  and  full 
of  unsuspected  riches.  Of  its  two  large  Roman- 
esque churches,  the  one  in  the  lower  town,  beside 
the  river,  is  notable,  without,  for  an  extremely 
beautiful  arcaded  apse,  and  contains  within  a 
striking  fresco  of  the  fifteenth  century,  in  which 
Christ  is  represented  followed  by  a  throng  of  the 
faithful — kings,  bishops,  monks  and  clerks — who 
help  to  carry  the  cross.  The  other,  and  larger, 
church,  planted  on  the  summit  of  the  abrupt 
escarpment  which  lifts  the  haute  ville  above  the 
Vienne,  has  a  strange  body-guard  composed  of 
no  fewer  than  five  feudal  castles,  huddled  so  close 
together  on  the  narrow  top  of  the  cliff  that  their 
outer  walls  almost  touch.  The  lack,  in  that  open 
country,  of  easily  fortified  points  doubtless  drove 

[92] 


PARIS  TO  POITIERS 

the  bishops  of  Poitiers  (who  were  also  barons  of 
Chauvigny)  into  this  strange  defensive  alliance 
with  four  of  their  noble  neighbours;  and  one 
wonders  how  the  five-sided  menage  kept  the 
peace,  when  local  disturbances  made  it  needful 
to  take  to  the  rock. 

The  gashed  walls  and  ivy-draped  dungeons  of 
the  rival  ruins  make  an  extraordinarily  romantic 
setting  for  the  curious  church  of  Saint  Pierre, 
staunchly  seated  on  an  extreme  ledge  of  the  cliff, 
and  gathering  under  its  flank  the  handful  of  town 
within  the  fortified  circuit.  There  is  nothing  in 
architecture  so  suggestive  of  extreme  age,  yet  of 
a  kind  of  hale  durability,  as  these  thick-set 
Romanesque  churches,  with  their  prudent  vault- 
ing, their  solid  central  towers,  the  close  firm 
grouping  of  their  apsidal  chapels.  The  Renais- 
sance brought  the  classic  style  into  such  perma- 
nent relationship  to  modern  life  that  eleventh- 
century  architecture  seems  remoter  than  Greece 
and  Rome;  yet  its  buildings  have  none  of  the 
perilous  frailty  of  the  later  Gothic,  and  one  asso- 
ciates the  idea  of  romance  and  ruin  rather  with 
the  pointed  arch  than  with  the  round. 

Saint  Pierre  is  a  singularly  good  example  of 
[93] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

this  stout  old  school,  which  saw  the  last  waves 
of  barbarian  invasion  break  at  its  feet,  and  seems 
likely  to  see  the  ebb  and  flow  of  so  many  other 
tides  before  its  stubborn  walls  go  under.  It  is 
in  their  sculptures,  especially,  that  these  churches 
reach  back  to  a  dim  and  fearful  world  of  which 
few  clues  remain  to  us:  the  mysterious  baleful 
creatures  peopling  their  archivolts  and  capitals 
seem  to  have  come  out  of  some  fierce  vision  of 
Cenobite  temptation,  when  the  hermits  of  the 
desert  fought  with  the  painted  devils  of  the 
tombs. 

The  apsidal  capitals  of  Saint  Pierre  are  a  very 
menagerie  of  such  strange  demons — evil  beasts 
grinning  and  mocking  among  the  stocky  saints 
and  angels  who  set  forth,  unconcerned  by  such 
hideous  propinquity,  the  story  of  the  birth  of 
Christ.  The  animals  are  much  more  skilfully 
modelled  than  the  angels,  and  at  Chauvigny  one 
slender  monster,  with  greyhound  flanks,  sub- 
human face,  and  long  curved  tail  ending  in  a 
grasping  human  hand,  haunts  the  memory  as  an 
embodiment  of  subtle  malevolence. 


[94] 


n 

POITIERS  TO   THE   PYRENEES 

THE  road  from  Poitiers  to  Angouleme  carries 
one  through  a  country  rolling  and  various 
in  line — a  country  with  a  dash  of  Normandy  in 
it,  but  facing  south  instead  of  west. 

The  villages  are  fewer  than  in  Normandy,  and 
make  less  mark  in  the  landscape;  but  the  way 
passes  through  two  drowsy  little  towns,  Civray 
and  Ruffec,  each  distinguished  by  the  possession 
of  an  important  church  of  the  typical  Roman- 
esque of  Poitou.  That  at  Civray,  in  particular, 
is  remarkable  enough  to  form  the  object  of  a  spe- 
cial pilgrimage,  and  to  find  it  precisely  in  one's 
path  seemed  part  of  the  general  brightness  of 
the  day.  Here  again  are  the  sculptured  arch- 
ivolt  and  the  rich  imagery  of  Poitiers — one 
strange  mutilated  figure  of  a  headless  horseman 
dominating  the  front  from  the  great  arcade  above 
the  doorway,  as  at  the  church  of  the  Sainte  Croix 

[95] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

in  Bordeaux;  but  the  facade  of  Civray  is  aston- 
ishingly topped  by  fifteenth-century  machicola- 
tions, which  somehow,  in  spite  of  their  later  date, 
give  it  an  air  of  greater  age,  of  reaching  back  to  a 
wild  warring  past. 

Angouleme,  set  on  a  promontory  between 
Charente  and  Anguienne,  commands  to  the 
north,  south  and  east  a  vast  circuit  of  meadowy 
and  woody  undulations.  The  interior  of  the 
town  struck  one  as  dull,  and  without  character- 
istic detail;  but  on  the  front  of  the  twelfth- 
century  cathedral,  perched  near  the  ledge  of  the 
cliff  above  the  Anguienne,  detail  abounds  as 
profusely  as  on  the  facade  of  Notre  Dame  at 
Poitiers.  It  is,  however,  so  much  less  subordi- 
nate to  the  general  conception  that  one  remem- 
bers rather  the  garlanding  of  archivolts,  the 
clustering  of  figures  in  countless  niches  and 
arcades,  than  the  fundamental  lines  which 
should  serve  to  bind  them  together;  and  the 
interior,  roofed  with  cupolas  after  the  manner  of 
Saint  Hilaire  of  Poitiers,  is  singularly  stark  and 
barren  looking. 

But  when  one  has  paid  due  tribute  to  the 
cathedral  one  is  called  on,  from  its  doorway,  to 

[96] 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

recognize  Angouleme's  other  striking  distinc- 
tion: its  splendid  natural  site,  and  the  way  in 
which  art  has  used  and  made  the  most  of  it. 
Starting  from  a  long  leafy  cours  with  private 
hotels,  a  great  avenue  curves  about  the  whole 
length  of  the  walls,  breaking  midway  into  a  ter- 
race boldly  hung  above  the  valley,  and  ending  in 
another  leafy  place,  beneath  which  the  slope  of  the 
hill  has  been  skilfully  transformed  into  a  public 
garden.  Angouleme  now  thrives  on  the  manu- 
facture of  paper,  and  may  therefore  conceivably 
permit  herself  such  civic  adornments ;  but  how  of 
the  many  small  hill-towns  of  France — such  as 
Laon  or  Thiers,  for  instance — which  apparently 
have  only  their  past  glory  to  subsist  on,  yet 
manage  to  lead  up  the  admiring  pilgrim  by  way 
of  these  sweeping  approaches,  encircling  terraces 
and  symmetrically  planted  esplanades?  One 
can  only  salute  once  again  the  invincible  French 
passion  for  form  and  fitness,  and  conclude  that 
towns  as  well  as  nations  somehow  always  manage 
to  give  themselves  what  they  regard  as  essential, 
and  that  happy  is  the  race  to  whom  these  things 
are  the  essentials. 

On  leaving  Angouleme  that  afternoon  we  saw 
[97] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

the  first  cypresses  and  the  first  almond  blossoms. 
We  were  in  the  south  at  last;  not  the  hot  deli- 
cately pencilled  Mediterranean  south,  which  has 
always  a  hint  of  the  East  in  it,  but  the  temperate 
Aquitanian  midi  cooled  by  the  gulf  of  Gascony. 
As  one  nears  Bordeaux  the  country  grows  less 
broken,  the  horizon-line  flatter;  but  there  is  one 
really  noble  impression,  when,  from  the  bridge 
of  Saint  Andre  de  Cubzac,  one  looks  out  on  the 
lordly  sweep  of  the  Dordogne,  just  before  it 
merges  its  waters  with  the  Garonne  to  form  the 
great  estuary  of  the  Gironde.  Soon  after  comes 
an  endless  dusty  faubourg,  then  the  long  stone 
bridge  over  the  Garonne,  and  the  proud  river- 
front of  Bordeaux — a  screen  of  eighteenth-cen- 
tury buildings  stretched  along  the  crescent-shaped 
quay.  Bordeaux,  thus  approached,  has  indeed, 
as  the  guide-book  says,  fort  grand  air;  and  again 
one  returns  thanks  to  the  motor,  which  almost 
always,  avoiding  the  mean  purlieus  of  the  rail- 
way station,  gives  one  these  romantic  or  stately 
first  impressions. 

This  river-front  of  Bordeaux  is  really  little 
more  than  the  architectural  screen,  a  street  or 
two  deep,  of  a  bustling,  bright  but  featureless 

|98] 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

commercial  town,  which,  from  the  Middle  Ages 
to  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century,  seems  to 
have  crowded  all  its  history  along  the  curve 
of  the  Garonne.  Even  the  early  church  of  the 
Holy  Cross — contemporaneous  with  Notre  Dame 
la  Grande  of  Poitiers — lifts  its  triple  row  of 
Romanesque  arcades  but  a  few  yards  from  the 
river;  and  close  by  is  Saint  Michel,  a  stately 
example  of  late  Gothic,  with  the  unusual  adjunct 
of  a  detached  bell-tower,  not  set  at  an  angle,  in 
Italian  fashion,  but  facing  the  church  squarely 
from  a  little  green  enclosure  across  the  street. 
But  these  vestiges  of  old  Bordeaux,  in  spite  of 
their  intrinsic  interest,  are,  on  the  whole,  less 
characteristic,  less  personal,  than  the  mise-en- 
scene  of  its  long  quay:  a  row  of  fine  old  hotels 
with  sculptured  pediments  and  stately  doorways, 
broken  midway  by  the  symmetrical  buildings  of 
the  Exchange  and  the  Custom  House,  and  ex- 
tending from  the  Arch  of  Triumph  opposite  the 
Pont  de  Bordeaux  to  the  great  Place  des  Quin- 
conces,  with  its  rostral  columns  and  balustraded 
terrace  above  the  river. 

To  the  modern   traveller  there   is  food  for 
thought  in  the  fact  that  Bordeaux  owes  this  great 

[99] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

decorative  composition — in  which  should  be 
included  the  theatre  unfolding  its  majestic  peri- 
style at  the  head  of  the  Place  de  la  Comedie — 
to  the  magnificent  taste  and  free  expenditure  of 
the  Intendant  Tourny,  who  ruled  the  province  of 
Guyenne  in  the  eighteenth  century.  Except  at  such 
high  moments  of  aesthetic  sensibility  as  produced 
the  monuments  of  Greece  and  republican  Italy  all 
large  schemes  of  civic  adornment  have  been  due 
to  the  initiative  of  one  man,  and  executed  without 
much  regard  to  the  rights  of  the  tax-payer;  and 
should  the  citizen  of  a  modern  republic  too 
rashly  congratulate  himself  on  exemption  from 
the  pillage  productive  of  such  results,  he  might 
with  equal  reason  remark  that  the  tribute  law- 
fully extracted  from  him  sometimes  seems  to 
produce  no  results  whatever. 

On  leaving  Bordeaux  we  deserted  the  route 
nationale  along  the  flat  west  bank  of  the  Garonne, 
and  recrossing  the  Pont  de  Bordeaux  ran  south 
through  the  white-wine  region  between  Garonne 
and  Dordogne — that  charming  strip  of  country 
which,  because  of  the  brackishness  of  the  river 
tides,  goes  by  the  unexpected  name  of  Entre- 

[100] 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

deux-Mers.  For  several  miles  we  skirted  a  line 
of  white  houses,  half  villa,  half  chateau,  set  in 
well-kept  gardens;  then  came  vineyards,  as  ex- 
quisitely kept,  and  packed  into  every  cranny  of 
the  rocky  coteaux,  save  where  here  and  there  a 
little  town  broke  the  view  of  the  river — chief 
among  them  Langoiron,  with  its  fine  fortress- 
ruin,  and  Cadillac  enclosed  in  stout  quadrangular 
walls. 

The  latter  place  has  the  interest  of  being 
one  of  those  symmetrically  designed  towns 
which,  toward  the  close  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
were  founded  throughout  south-western  France 
to  draw  " back  to  the  land"  a  population  depleted 
and  demoralised  by  long  years  of  warfare  and 
barbarian  invasion.  These  curious  made-to- 
order  towns — bastides,  or  villes  neuves — were  usu- 
ally laid  out  on  a  rectilinear  plan,  with  a  town- 
hall  forming  the  centre  of  an  arcaded  market- 
place, to  which  four  streets  led  from  gateways  in 
the  four  walls.  Among  the  most  characteristic 
examples  are  Aigues  Mortes,  which  Saint  Louis 
called  into  existence  to  provide  himself  with  a 
Mediterranean  port,  and  Cordes,  near  Gaillac, 
founded  a  little  later  by  Count  Raymond  of 

[101] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

Toulouse,  and  somewhat  ambitiously  named  by 
him  after  the  city  of  Cordova. 

At  Cadillac  the  specific  physiognomy  of  the 
mediaeval  bastide  is  overshadowed  by  the  lofty 
proportions  and  high-pitched  roof  of  the  chateau 
which  a  sixteenth-century  Duke  of  Epernon 
planted  in  an  angle  of  the  walls.  The  adjoining 
parish  church — itself  of  no  mean  dimensions — 
was  once  but  the  private  chapel  of  these  same 
dukes,  who  have  left  such  a  large  architectural 
impress  on  their  small  shabby  town;  and  one 
grieves  to  learn  that  the  chief  monument  of  their 
rule  has  fallen  to  base  uses,  and  been  stripped  of 
the  fine  interior  decorations  which  its  majestic 
roof  once  sheltered. 

South-west  of  Cadillac  the  road  passes  through 
a  vast  stretch  of  pine-forest  with  a  dry  aromatic 
undergrowth — an  outskirt  of  the  great  landes 
that  reach  inward  from  the  gulf  of  Gascony. 
On  and  on  runs  the  white  shadow-barred  high- 
way, between  ranges  of  red  boles  and  sun- 
flecked  heathy  clearings — and  when,  after  long 
hours,  one  emerges  from  the  unwonted  mystery 
and  solitude  of  this  piny  desert  into  the  usual 

[102] 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

busy  agricultural  France,  the  land  is  breaking 
southward  into  hilly  waves,  and  beyond  the  hills 
are  the  Pyrenees. 

Yet  one's  first  real  sight  of  them — so  masked 
are  they  by  lesser  ranges — is  got  next  day  from 
the  terrace  at  Pau,  that  astonishing  balcony  hung 
above  the  great  amphitheatre  of  south-western 
France.  Seen  thus,  with  the  prosaic  English- 
provincial-looking  town  at  one's  back,  and  the 
park-like  green  coteaux  intervening  beyond  the 
Gave,  the  austere  white  peaks,  seemingly  afloat 
in  heaven  (for  their  base  is  almost  always  lost  in 
mist) ,  have  a  disconcerting  look  of  irrelevance,  of 
disproportion,  of  being  subjected  to  a  kind  of  in- 
dignity of  inspection,  like  caged  carnivora  in  a  zoo. 

And  Pau,  on  farther  acquaintance,  utterly  re- 
fuses to  be  brought  into  any  sort  of  credible 
relation  with  its  great  southern  horizon ;  conducts 
itself,  architecturally  and  socially,  like  a  com- 
fortable little  spa  in  a  plain,  and  rises  only  by  a 
great  deal  of  hoisting  on  the  part  of  the  imagina- 
tive sight-seer  to  the  height  of  its  own  dapper 
brick  castle,  which  it  has  domesticated  into  an 
empty  desultory  museum,  and  tethered  down 
with  a  necklet  of  turf  and  flowers. 

[103] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

But  Pau's  real  purpose  is  to  serve  as  the  hub 
of  a  great  wheel,  of  which  the  spokes,  made  of 
smooth  white  roads,  radiate  away  into  every  fold 
and  cleft  of  the  country.  As  a  centre  for  ex- 
cursions there  is  no  place  like  it  in  France,  be- 
cause there  is  nothing  in  France  that  quite 
matches  the  sweetness  and  diversity  of  the  long 
Pyrenean  border.  Nowhere  else  are  the  pastoral 
and  sylvan  so  happily  mated,  nowhere  the  villages 
so  compact  of  thrift  and  romance,  the  foreground 
so  sweet,  the  distances  so  sublime  and  shining. 

Whichever  way  one  turns — down  the  winding 
southern  valleys  toward  Lourdes  and  Argeles,  or 
to  Oloron  and  the  Eaux  Chaudes;  westward, 
over  low  hills,  to  the  old  town  of  Orthez  and  the 
Salies  de  Beam;  or  east,  again,  to  the  plain  of 
Tarbes  in  its  great  ring  of  snow-peaks — always 
there  is  the  same  fulness  of  impressions,  always 
the  same  brightness  and  the  same  nobility. 

For  a  culminating  instance  of  these  impres- 
sions one  might  choose,  on  a  spring  afternoon, 
the  run  to  Lourdes  by  the  valley  of  the  Gave  and 
Betharram. 

First  rich  meadows,  hedgerows,  village  streets ; 
then  fields  again  and  hills;  then  the  brown  rush 

[104] 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

of  the  Gave  between  wooded  banks ;  and,  where 
the  river  threads  the  arch  of  an  ivied  bridge,  the 
turreted  monastery  walls  and  pilgrimage  church 
of  Betharram — a  deserted  seventeenth-century 
Lourdes,  giving  one  a  hint  of  what  the  modern 
sanctuary  might  have  been  had  the  millions 
spent  on  it  been  drawn  from  the  faithful  when 
piety  still  walked  with  art. 

Betharram,  since  its  devotees  have  forsaken 
it,  is  a  quite  negligible  "sight,"  relegated  to  small 
type  even  in  the  copious  Joanne;  yet  in  view  of 
what  is  coming  it  is  worth  while  to  pause  before 
its  half-Spanish,  half- Venetian  church  front,  and 
to  obey  the  suave  yet  noble  gesture  with  which 
the  Virgin  above  the  doorway  calls  her  pilgrims 
in. 

She  has  only  a  low  brown  church  to  show,  with 
heavy  stucco  angels  spreading  their  gilded  wings 
down  a  perspective  of  incense-fogged  baroque; 
but  the  image  of  it  will  come  back  when  presently, 
standing  under  the  big  dome  of  the  Lourdes 
"Basilica,"  one  gives  thanks  that  modern  piety 
chose  to  build  its  own  shrine  instead  of  laying 
hands  on  an  old  one. 

There  are  two  Lourdes,  the  "grey"  and  the 
[105] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

"white."  The  former,  undescribed  and  un- 
visited,  is  simply  one  of  the  most  picturesque  and 
feudal-looking  hill  villages  in  Europe.  Planted 
on  a  steep  rock  at  the  mouth  of  the  valley,  the 
mountains  pressing  it  close  to  the  west  and  south, 
it  opposes  its  unbroken  walls  and  stern  old  keep 
to  the  other,  the  "white"  town  sprawling  on 
the  river  bank — the  town  of  the  Basilica,  the 
Rosary,  the  Grotto:  a  congeries  of  pietistic  hotels, 
pensions,  pedlars'  booths  and  panoramas,  where 
the  Grand  Hotel  du  Casino  or  du  Palais  adjoins 
the  Pension  de  la  Premiere  Apparition,  and  the 
blue-sashed  Vierge  de  Lourdes  on  the  threshold 
calls  attention  to  the  electric  light  and  dejeuner 
par  petites  tables  within. 

Out  of  this  vast  sea  of  vulgarism — the  more 
aggressive  and  intolerable  because  its  last  waves 
break  against  one  of  the  loveliest  landscapes  of 
this  lovely  country — rises  what  the  uninstructed 
tourist  might  be  pardoned  for  regarding  as  the 
casino  of  an  eminently  successful  watering-place 
— as  the  Grotto  beneath,  with  its  drinking- 
fountains,  baths,  bottling-taps  and  boutiques, 
might  stand  for  the  "Source"  or  "Brunnen" 
where  the  hypochondriac  pays  toll  to  Hygieia 

£106] 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

before  seeking  relaxation  in  the  gilded  halls 
above.  For  the  shrine  of  Bernadette  has  long 
since  been  overlaid  by  the  machinery  of  a  vast 
"business  enterprise,"  a  scheme  of  life  in  which 
every  heart-beat  is  itemised,  tariffed  and  ex- 
ploited, so  that  even  the  invocations  encrusting 
by  thousands  the  Basilica  walls  seem  to  record  so 
many  cases  of  definite  "give  and  take,"  so  many 
bargains  struck  with  heaven — en  souvenir  de  mon 
vceu,  reconnaissance  pour  une  guerison,  souvenir 
a"une  priere  exaucee,  and  so  on — and  as  one 
turns  away  from  this  monument  of  a  thriving 
industry  one  may  be  pardoned  for  remembering 
the  plane-tree  by  the  Ilissus  and  another  invoca- 
tion: 

"Ye  gods,  give  me  beauty  in  the  inward  soul; 
and  may  the  inner  and  the  outer  man  be  one." 

But  beyond  Lourdes  is  Argeles,  and  at  the 
first  turn  of  the  road  one  is  again  in  the  fresh 
Pyrenean  country,  among  budding  crops,  sleek 
fawn-coloured  cattle,  and  the  grave  handsome 
peasantry  who  make  one  feel  that  the  devotional 
viile  d'eaux  one  has  just  left  is  a  mushroom 
growth  quite  unrelated  to  the  life  of  industry  to 
which  these  agricultural  landscapes  testify. 

[107] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

There  is  always  an  added  interest — architect- 
ural and  racial — about  the  border  regions  where 
the  idiosyncrasies  of  one  people  "run,"  as  it 
were,  into  those  adjoining;  and  a  key  to  the  char- 
acter of  each  is  given  by  noting  precisely  what 
traits  have  survived  in  transplantation.  The 
Pyreneans  have  a  certain  Spanish  seriousness, 
but  so  tempered  by  Gallic  good-humour  that 
their  address  recalls  the  perfectly  mingled  courte- 
sy and  self-respect  of  the  Tuscan  peasant.  One 
feels  in  it,  at  any  rate,  the  result  of  an  old  civilisa- 
tion blent  with  independence  and  simplicity  of 
living ;  and  these  bold  handsome  men,  straight  of 
feature  and  limb,  seem  the  natural  product  of 
their  rich  hill-country,  so  disciplined  by  industry, 
yet  so  romantically  free. 

Argeles  is  a  charming  old  hill-town,  which  has 
kept  itself  quite  aloof  from  the  new  watering-place 
of  Gazost  in  the  plain ;  but  the  real  object  of  the 
excursion  lies  higher  up  the  valley,  in  a  chestnut 
forest  on  the  slope  of  the  mountains.  Here  the 
tiny  village  of  Saint  Savin  swarms  bee-like  about 
its  great  Romanesque  church — a  naked  massive 
structure,  like  the  skeleton  of  some  prehistoric 
animal  half  emerging  from  the  rock.     Old  as  it 

[108] 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

is,  it  is  rooted  in  remains  of  greater  antiquity — 
the  fallen  walls  of  an  abbey  of  Charlemagne's 
building,  itself  raised,  the  legend  runs,  on  the  site 
of  a  Roman  villa  which  once  served  as  the  hermit- 
age of  Saint  Savin,  son  of  a  Count  of  Barcelona. 

It  has  been  the  fate  of  too  many  venerable 
architectural  relics  to  sacrifice  their  bloom  of 
vetuste  to  the  scrupulous  care  which  makes  them 
look  like  conscious  cossetted  old  ladies,  of  whom 
their  admiring  relatives  say:  "Should  you  ever 
suspect  her  age  ?" — and  only  in  such  remote  mon- 
uments as  that  of  Saint  Savin  does  one  get  the 
sense  of  undisguised  antiquity,  of  a  long  stolid 
existence  exposed  to  every  elemental  influence. 
The  result  is  an  impression  of  rugged,  taciturn 
strength,  and  of  mysterious  memories  striking 
back,  as  in  the  holy-water  basin  of  the  transept, 
and  the  uncouth  capitals  of  the  chapter-house,  to 
those  dark  days  when  Christian  civilisation  hung 
in  the  balance,  and  the  horn  of  Roland  sounded 
down  the  pass. 

But  a  mediaeval  church  is  always  more  or  less 
in  the  order  of  nature:  there  is  something  more 
incongruous  about  a  mediaeval  watering-place. 
Yet  the  Pyrenees  abound  in  them;  and  at  Cau- 

[109] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

terets,  farther  up  the  same  valley,  the  monks  of 
this  very  monastery  of  Saint  Savin  maintained,  in 
the  tenth  century,  "habitations  to  facilitate  the 
use  of  the  baths."  Of  the  original  Cauterets, 
however,  little  remains,  and  to  get  an  impression 
of  an  old  ville  d'eaux  one  must  turn  westward 
from  Pau,  and  strike  across  the  hills,  by  ways  of 
exceeding  beauty,  to  the  Salies  de  Beam.  The 
frequentation  of  these  saline  springs  dates  back 
as  far  as  the  monkish  charter  of  Cauterets;  and 
the  old  town  of  the  Salies,  with  its  incredibly 
picturesque  half-timbered  houses,  its  black  bal- 
conies and  gables  above  the  river,  looks  much  as 
it  must  have  when,  in  1587,  a  charter  was  drawn 
up  for  the  regular  "exploitation"  of  the  baths. 

Pushing  still  farther  westward  one  meets  the 
highway  to  Bayonne  and  Biarritz,  and  may 
thence  pass  south  by  Saint  Jean  de  Luz  and 
Hendaye  to  the  Spanish  border.  But  the  spokes 
of  the  wheel  radiate  in  so  many  different  direc- 
tions and  lead  to  scenes  so  extraordinarily  varied 
— from  the  savage  gorge  of  the  Eaux-Chaudes 
to  the  smiling  vale  of  Saint  Jean  Pied-de-Port, 
from  the  romantic  pass  of  the  Pied  de  Roland  to 
Fontarrabia    perched    like    a    painted    Spanish 

[110] 


SALIES  DE  BEARN:     VIEW  OF  OLD  TOWN 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

Virgin  on  its  rock  above  the  gulf  of  Gascony — 
that  to  do  them  any  sort  of  justice  the  comet- 
flight  of  the  motor  would  have  to  be  bound  down 
to  an  orbit  between  Bidassoa  and  Garonne. 

Familiarity  cannot  blunt  the  wonder  of  the 
climb  from  Pau  to  the  crest  of  the  hills  above 
Tarbes.  Southward  the  Pyrenees  unfold  them- 
selves in  a  long  line  of  snows,  and  ahead  every 
turn  of  the  road  gives  a  fresh  glimpse  of  wood 
and  valley,  of  thriving  villages  and  farms,  till 
the  last  jut  of  the  ridge  shows  Tarbes  far  off  in 
the  plain,  with  the  dim  folds  of  the  Cevennes 
clouding  the  eastern  distance. 

All  along  the  northeastern  skirt  of  the  Pyrenees 
runs  the  same  bright  and  opulent  country;  and 
at  the  old  market-town  of  Montrejeau,  where  the 
Garonne  cuts  its  way  down  the  vale  of  Luchon, 
there  is  just  such  a  fortunate  grouping  of  hill  and 
river,  and  distant  high-perched  ruin,  as  our  grand- 
parents admired  in  landscapes  of  the  romantic 
school.  It  was  our  good  luck  to  enter  Montre- 
jeau on  Easter  Monday,  while  the  market  was 
going  on,  and  the  narrow  streets  were  packed 
with  mild  cream-coloured  cattle  and  their  lively 

[111] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

blue-smocked  drivers.  Great  merriment  and 
general  good-humour  marked  our  passage 
through  the  town  to  the  big  inn  with  its  open 
galleries  and  old-fashioned  courtyard ;  and  here, 
the  dining-room  being  as  packed  as  the  streets, 
our  table  was  laid  in  a  sunny  old  walled  garden 
full  of  spring  flowers  and  clipped  yews. 

It  seemed  impossible  that  any  incident  of  the 
afternoon  should  be  quite  at  the  height  of  this 
gay  repast,  consumed  in  fragrance  and  sunshine ; 
but  we  began  to  think  differently  when,  an  hour 
or  two  later,  we  took  the  first  curve  of  the  long 
climb  to  Saint  Bertrand  de  Comminges.  This 
atom  of  a  town,  hugging  a  steep  wedge  of  rock 
at  the  mouth  of  the  vale  of  Luchon,  was  once — 
and  for  many  centuries — a  diocesan  seat;  and 
who,  by  all  the  spirits  of  incongruousness,  should 
one  of  its  last  bishops  be,  but  the  uncle  of  that 
acute  and  lively  Madame  de  Boigne  whose 
memoirs  have  recently  shed  such  light  on  the  last 
days  of  the  Old  Regime  ? 

By  no  effort  of  imagination  can  one  project 
into  the  single  perpendicular  street  of  Saint 
Bertrand,  topped  by  its  rugged  Gothic  cathedral, 
the  gallant  figure  of  Monseigneur  Dillon,  one  of 

[112] 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

those  philosophical  prelates  whom  one  instinctive- 
ly places  against  the  lambris  dores  of  an  episcopal 
palace  hung  with  Boucher  tapestries.  But  in 
truth  the  little  town  has  too  old  and  strange  a 
history  to  be  conscious  of  so  fugitive  an  incident 
of  its  past.  For  its  foundations  were  laid  by  the 
mountain  tribes  who  harassed  Pompey's  legions 
and  were  driven  back  by  him  into  the  valley  of 
the  Garonne;  and  in  due  time  a  great  temple 
rose  on  what  is  now  the  rock  of  the  cathedral. 
Walls  and  ramparts  presently  enclosed  it,  and 
the  passage  of  the  Vandals  having  swept  the 
dwellers  of  the  plain  back  into  this  impregnable 
circuit,  Comminges  became  an  episcopal  city 
when  the  Catholic  Church  was  organised  in  Gaul. 
Thereafter  it  underwent  all  the  vicissitudes  of 
barbarian  invasion,  falling  at  last  into  such  decay 
that  for  five  hundred  years  it  is  said  to  have  been 
without  inhabitants.  Yet  the  episcopal  line  was 
maintained  without  more  than  one  long  break, 
and  in  the  eleventh  century  the  diocese  woke  to 
life  at  the  call  of  its  saintly  Bishop,  Bertrand  de 
ITsle  Jourdain.  Saint  Bertrand  began  the  cathe- 
dral and  built  about  it  the  mediaeval  town  which 
bears  his  name:  and  two  hundred  years  later 

[113] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

another  Bertrand  de  Comminges,  raised  to  the 
papacy  as  Clement  V.,  but  still  mindful  of  the 
welfare  of  his  former  diocese,  completed  the 
Romanesque  pile  by  the  addition  of  a  vast  Gothic 
nave  and  choir. 

It  is  the  church  of  Clement  V.  that  still  crowns 
the  rock  of  Comminges,  contrasting  by  its  monu- 
mental proportions  with  the  handful  of  houses  en- 
closed in  the  walls  at  its  base.  The  inhabitants 
of  Comminges  number  at  present  but  some  five 
hundred,  and  the  town  subsists,  the  guide-books 
tell  one,  only  on  its  religious  festivals,  the  fame  of 
its  monuments,  and  the  fidelity  of  a  few  "old 
families"  who  are  kept  there  par  le  prestige  des 
souvenirs. 

One  wonders,  climbing  the  steep  street,  which 
of  its  decrepit  houses  are  inhabited  by  these  in- 
teresting devotees  of  the  past.  No  life  is  visible 
save  that  contributed  by  a  few  bleary  old  women 
squatted  under  mouldering  arches,  and  a  fire-fly 
dance  of  children  about  the  stony  square  before 
the  church;  and  the  church  itself  seems  with- 
drawn immeasurably  far  into  the  past,  sunk  back 
upon  dim  ancient  memories  of  Gaul  and  Visi- 
goth. 

[114] 


POITIERS  TO  THE  PYRENEES 

One  gets  an  even  intenser  sense  of  these  dis- 
tances from  the  little  cloister  wedged  against  the 
church-flank  and  overhanging  the  radiant  valley 
of  the  Garonne — a  queer  cramped  enceinte, 
with  squat  arches  supported  by  monster-girdled 
capitals,  and  in  one  case  by  a  strange  group  of 
battered  figures,  supposedly  the  four  Evangelists, 
one  of  whom — the  Saint  John — is  notable  in 
Romanesque  archaeology  for  bearing  in  his  arms 
the  limp  lamb  which  is  his  attribute. 

The  effect  of  antiquity  is  enhanced,  as  at 
Saint  Savin,  by  the  beneficent  neglect  which  has 
allowed  the  exterior  of  the  building  to  take  on  all 
the  scars  and  hues  of  age;  so  that  one  comes 
with  a  start  of  surprise  on  the  rich  and  carefully 
tended  interior,  where  a  brilliant  bloom  of  Re- 
naissance decoration  has  overlaid  the  stout 
Gothic  framework. 

This  airy  curtain,  masking  choir,  rood-screen 
and  organ-loft  in  a  lace-work  of  delicate  yet 
hardy  wood-carving,  has  kept,  in  the  dry  Pyre- 
nean  air,  all  its  sharpness  of  detail,  acquiring  only 
a  lustre  of  surface  that  gives  it  almost  the  texture 
of  old  bronze.  It  is  wonderfully  free  and  fanci- 
ful, yet  tempered  by  the  southern  sense  of  form; 

[115] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

subdued  to  the  main  lines  of  the  composition,  but 
breaking  into  the  liveliest  ripples  of  leaf  and 
flower,  of  bird  and  sprite  and  angel,  till  its  audac- 
ities culminate  in  the  scaly  undulations  of  the 
mermaids  on  the  terminal  seats  of  the  choir — 
creatures  of  bale  and  beauty,  who  seem  to  have 
brought  from  across  the  Alps  their  pagan  eyes 
and  sidelong  Lombard  smile. 

The  finger-tailed  monster  of  Chauvigny,  the 
plaintively  real  bat  of  the  choir-stall  at  Poitiers, 
and  these  siren  evocations  of  a  classic  past  group 
themselves  curiously  in  the  mind  as  embodiments 
of  successive  phases  of  human  fancy,  imaginative 
interpretations  of  life. 


[116] 


ST.   BERTRAND-DE-COMMINGES:    PIER  OF  THE  FOUR  EVANGELISTS  IN  THE 

CLOISTER 


m 

THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

AS  one  turns  north-eastward  from  the  Pyre- 
•*■  *■  nees  the  bright  abundant  landscape 
passes  gradually  into  a  flattish  grey-and-drab 
country  that  has  ceased  to  be  Aquitaine  and  is 
yet  not  Provence. 

A  dull  region  at  best,  this  department  of 
Haute  Garonne  grows  positively  forbidding  when 
the  mistral  rakes  it,  whitening  the  vineyards  and 
mulberry  orchards,  and  bowing  the  shabby 
cypresses  against  a  confused  grey  sky ;  nor  is  the 
landscape  redeemed  by  the  sprawling  silhouette 
of  Toulouse — a  dingy  wind-ridden  city,  stretched 
wide  on  the  flat  banks  of  the  Garonne,  and  hiding 
its  two  precious  buildings  in  a  network  of  mean 
brick  streets. 

One  might  venture  the  general  axiom  that 
France  has  never  wholly  understood  the  use  of 
brick,  and  that  where  stone  construction  ceases 

[117] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

architectural  beauty  ceases  with  it.  Saint  Sernin, 
the  great  church  of  Toulouse,  is  noble  enough  in 
line,  and  full  of  interest  as  marking  the  culmina- 
tion of  French  Romanesque ;  but  compared  with 
the  brick  churches  of  northern  Italy  it  seems 
struck  with  aridity,  parched  and  bleached  as  a 
skeleton  in  a  desert.  The  Capitoul,  with  its 
frivolous  eighteenth-century  front,  has  indeed 
more  warmth  and  relief  than  any  other  building 
in  Toulouse;  but  meanly  surrounded  by  shabby 
brick  houses,  it  seems  to  await  in  vain  the  devel- 
opment of  ramps  and  terraces  that  should  lead  up 
to  its  long  bright  facade. 

As  the  motor  enters  the  hill-country  to  the 
northeast  of  Toulouse  the  land  breaks  away  pleas- 
antly toward  the  long  blue  line  of  the  Cevennes ; 
and  presently  a  deep  cleft  fringed  with  green 
reveals  the  nearness  of  the  Tarn — that  strange 
river  gnawing  its  way  through  cheesy  perpen- 
dicular banks. 

Along  these  banks  fantastic  brick  towns  are 
precariously  piled:  L'Isle-sur-Tarn,  with  an 
octagonal  brick  belfry,  and  Rabastens,  raised  on 
a  series  of  bold  arcaded  terraces,  which  may  be 
viewed  to  advantage  from  a  suspension-bridge 

[118] 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

high  above  the  river.  Aside  from  its  exception- 
ally picturesque  site,  Rabastens  is  notable  for  a 
curious  brick  church  with  fortified  tower  and 
much-restored  fourteenth-century  frescoes  cloth- 
ing its  interior  like  a  dim  richly  woven  tissue. 
But  beyond  Rabastens  lies  Albi,  and  after  a  mid- 
day halt  at  Gaillac,  most  desolate  and  dusty  of 
towns,  we  pressed  on  again  through  the  parched 
country. 

Albi  stood  out  at  length  upon  the  sky — a  glar- 
ing mass  of  houses  stacked  high  above  the  deep 
cleft  of  the  Tarn.  The  surrounding  landscape 
was  all  dust  and  dazzle;  the  brick  streets  were 
funnels  for  the  swooping  wind;  and  high  up, 
against  the  blinding  blue,  rose  the  flanks  of  the 
brick  cathedral,  like  those  of  some  hairless  pink 
monster  that  had  just  crawled  up  from  the  river 
to  bask  on  the  cliff.  This  first  impression  of 
animal  monstrosity — of  an  unwieldly  antedilu- 
vian mass  of  flesh — is  not  dispelled  by  a  nearer 
approach.  From  whatever  angle  one  views  the 
astounding  building  its  uncouth  shape  and  flesh- 
like tint  produce  the  effect  of  a  living  organism — 
high-backed,  swollen-thighed,  wallowing — a  giant 
Tarasque  or  other  anomalous  offspring  of  the 

[119] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

Bestiary;  and  if  one  rejects  the  animal  analogy 
as  too  grotesque,  to  what  else  may  one  conceiv- 
ably compare  it  ? 

Among  the  fortified  churches  of  south-western 
France  this  strange  monument  is  the  strangest 
as  it  is  the  most  vast,  and  none  of  the  accepted 
architectural  categories  seems  to  fit  its  huge 
vaulted  hall  buttressed  with  tall  organ-pipe 
turrets,  and  terminating  to  the  west  in  a  massive 
dungeon-like  tower  flanked  by  pepper-pot  pin- 
nacles. 

The  interior  of  the  great  secular-looking  salle 
is  covered  by  an  unbroken  expanse  of  mural 
painting,  and  encrusted,  overgrown  almost,  from 
the  choir  and  ambulatory  to  the  arches  of  the 
lateral  chapels,  with  a  prodigious  efflorescence 
of  late  Gothic  wood-carving  and  sculpture,  half 
Spanish  in  its  dusky  grey-brown  magnificence. 
But  even  this  excess  of  ecclesiastical  ornament 
does  not  avail  to  Christianise  the  church — 
there  is  a  pagan,  a  Saracenic  quality  about 
it  that  seems  to  overflow  from  its  pinnacled 
flushed  exterior. 

To  reach  Carcassonne  from  Albi  one  must 
cross  the  central  mass  of  the  Cevennes.     The 

[120] 


ALBI:     INTERIOR  OF  THE  CATHEDRAL 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

way  leads  first,  by  hill  and  dale,  through  a 
wooded  northern-looking  landscape,  to  the  town 
of  Castres,  distinguished  by  a  charming  hotel  de 
ville  with  a  box-planted  garden  said  to  have  been 
laid  out  by  Lenotre;  and  soon  after  Castres  the 
" wild-ridged  steeps"  break  away  in  widening 
undulations  as  the  road  throws  its  loops  about 
the  sides  of  the  Montagne  Noire — black  hollows 
deepening  dizzily  below,  and  long  grey  vistas 
unfolding  between  the  crowded  peaks.  Un- 
happily a  bourrasque  enveloped  us  before  we 
reached  the  top  of  the  pass,  so  that  we  lost  all 
the  beauty  of  the  long  southern  descent  to  Car- 
cassonne, and  were  aware  of  it  only  as  a  distant 
tangle  of  lights  in  the  plain,  toward  which  we 
groped  painfully  through  wind  and  rain. 

The  rain  persisted  the  next  day;  but  perhaps 
it  is  a  not  undesirable  accompaniment  to  a  first 
view  of  Carcassonne,  since  it  eliminates  that 
tout-and-tourist  element  which  has  so  possessed 
itself  of  the  ancient  cite,  restoring  to  it,  under  a 
grey  blurred  light,  something  of  its  narrow 
huddled  mediaeval  life. 

He  who  has  gone  there  with  wrath  in  his  heart 
against  Viollet-le-Duc  may  even,  under  these 

[121] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

mitigating  conditions,  go  so  far  as  to  think  that 
the  universal  restorer  has  for  once  been  justified 
by  his  results — that,  granting  in  advance  the 
possibility  of  innumerable  errors  of  detail,  his 
brilliant  hypothesis  still  produces  a  total  im- 
pression of  reality.  Perhaps,  too,  all  the  floating 
tags  of  literary  medievalism — the  irresistible 
"connotations"  of  keep  and  rampart  and  port- 
cullis— help  out  the  illusion,  animate  the  serried 
little  burgh,  and  people  it  with  such  figures  as 
Dante  walked  among  when  Bellincion  Berti  went 
girt  with  leather.  At  any  rate,  the  impression  is 
there — for  those  who  have  the  hardihood  to  take 
it — there  all  the  more  palpably  on  a  day  of  such 
unbroken  rain,  when  even  the  official  custodians 
hug  their  stove,  and  a  beneficent  mist  hides  the 
stacks  of  post-cards  and  souvenirs  waylaying  the 
traveller  from  every  window. 

The  weather,  however,  so  beneficent  at  Car- 
cassonne, proved  an  obstacle  to  the  seeing  of 
Narbonne  and  Beziers,  and  drove  us  relentlessly 
before  it  to  Nimes,  where  it  gave  us,  the  next 
morning,  one  of  those  brilliant  southern  days  that 
are  born  of  the  southern  deluges.  Here  was 
Provence  at  last — dry,  clear-edged,  classic — with 

[122] 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

a  sky  like  blue  marble,  low  red  hills  tufted  by 
olives,  stony  hollows  with  thin  threads  of  stream, 
and  a  sun  that  picked  out  in  gold  the  pure  curves 
of  the  Maison  Carree. 

Among  the  Greek  towns  of  the  Mediterranean 
there  is  none  as  Greek — or,  to  speak  more  pre- 
cisely, as  Grseco-Roman — as  Nimes.  No  other 
city  of  old  Gaul  seems  to  have  put  itself  so  com- 
pletely in  harmony  with  its  rich  nucleus  of 
"remains" — eliminating  or  omitting  the  monu- 
ments of  other  periods,  and  content  to  group  its 
later  growth  subserviently  about  the  temple  and 
the  amphitheatre.  It  was  very  well  for  Aries  to 
make  its  Romanesque  venture,  for  Rheims  to 
crown  itself  with  a  glory  of  Gothic;  but  with  the 
tranquil  lines  of  the  Maison  Carree  and  the 
Nymphseum,  the  rhythmic  spring  of  the  arena 
arches,  to  act  as  centralising  influences — above 
all  with  the  overwhelming  grandeur  of  the  Pont 
du  Gard  as  a  background — how  could  Nimes, 
so  far  more  deeply  pledged  to  the  past,  do  other- 
wise than  constitute  herself  the  guardian  of  great 
memories  ?  The  Pont  du  Gard  alone  would  be 
enough  to  relegate  any  town  to  a  state  of  ancil- 
lary subjection.     Its  nearness  is  as  subduing  as 

[123] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

that  of  a  great  mountain,  and  next  to  the  Mont 
Ventoux  it  is  the  sublimest  object  in  Provence. 
The  solitude  of  its  site,  and  the  austere  lines  of 
the  surrounding  landscape,  make  it  appear  as 
much  on  the  outer  edge  of  civilisation  as  when  it 
was  first  planted  there;  and  its  long  defile  of 
arches  seems  to  be  forever  pushing  on  into  the 
wilderness  with  the  tremendous  tread  of  the 
Roman  legions. 

By  one  of  the  charming  oppositions  of  French 
travel,  one  may  return  from  this  classic  pilgrim- 
age through  the  mediaeval  town  of  Uzes;  and, 
as  if  such  contrasts  were  not  fruitful  enough,  may 
pause  on  the  way  to  smile  at  the  fantastic  chateau 
d'Angivilliers — a  half-ruined  eighteenth-century 
"Folly"  with  an  anachronistic  medley  of  kiosks, 
arcades,  pagodas,  a  chapel  like  a  Roman  tem- 
ple, and  a  ruined  box-garden  haunted  by  pea- 
cocks. 

Uzes  itself,  a  steep  town  clustered  about  the 
ducal  keep  of  the  Crussols,  has  a  stately  terrace 
above  the  valley,  and  some  fine  eighteenth-cent- 
ury houses,  in  shabby  streets  insufficiently  swept; 
but  its  chief  feature  is  of  course  the  castle  which, 
planted  protectingly  in  the  centre  of  the  town, 

[124] 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

thrusts  up  its  central  dungeon  over  a  fine  feudal 
jumble  of  subsidiary  masonry. 

From  Nimes  to  the  Mediterranean  the  im- 
pressions are  packed  too  thick.  First  the  Rhone, 
with  the  castles  of  Tarascon  and  Beaucaire 
taunting  each  other  across  its  yellow  flood,  Beau- 
caire from  a  steep  cliff,  Tarascon  from  the  very 
brink  of  the  river;  then,  after  a  short  flight 
through  olive-orchards  and  vineyards,  the  pretty 
leafy  town  of  Saint  Remy  on  the  skirts  of  the 
Alpilles ;  and  a  mile  to  the  south  of  Saint  Remy, 
on  a  chalky  ledge  of  the  low  mountain-chain, 
the  two  surviving  monuments  of  the  Roman  city 
of  Glanum.  They  are  set  side  by  side,  the  tomb 
and  the  triumphal  arch,  in  a  circular  grassy  space 
enclosed  with  olive-orchards  and  backed  by 
delicate  fretted  peaks:  not  another  vestige  of 
Roman  construction  left  to  connect  them  with  the 
past.  Was  it,  one  wonders,  their  singular  beauty 
that  saved  them,  that  held  even  the  Visigoths' 
hands  when  they  wiped  out  every  other  trace 
of  the  populous  city  of  stone-quarriers,  with  its 
aqueducts,  walls  and  temples  ?  Certainly,  seeing 
the  two  buildings  thus  isolated  under  the  radiant 
lonely  sky,  one  is  tempted  to  exclaim  that  they 

[125] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

might  well  have  checked  even  barbarian  violence, 
and  that  never  again  did  the  stout  Roman  trunk 
throw  out  two  such  flowers  of  grace  and  lightness. 
It  is  as  though,  from  that  packed  Provencal  soil, 
some  dust  of  Greece  had  passed  into  the  Latin 
stem,  clearing  a  little  its  thick  sap;  yet  it  is  just 
because  the  monuments  remain  so  sturdily 
Roman  that  the  grace  and  the  lightness  count  so 
much. 

This  Alpilles  country  between  Rhone  and 
Durance  is  itself  the  most  Grecian  thing  west  of 
Greece :  Provence  of  Provence  in  every  line  of  its 
bare  sharp-cut  heights,  tufted  with  a  spare  classic 
growth  of  olive,  cistus  and  myrtle,  it  explains  why 
the  Greek  colonist  found  himself  at  home  on 
these  ultimate  shores,  and  why  the  Roman  con- 
queror bowed  here  to  Attic  influences. 

Pushing  south-east  from  Saint  Remy,  one 
comes,  through  a  broadening  landscape,  to  the 
old  town  of  Salon,  where  Nostradamus  is  buried, 
and  thence,  by  a  winding  road  among  the  hills,  to 
the  wide  valley  where  Aix-en-Provence  lies  en- 
circled in  mountains. 

For  a  town  so  nobly  seated  it  seems,  at  first 
approach,  a  little  commonplace  and  insignificant; 

[126] 


SAINT-REMY:     THE  MAUSOLEUM 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

the  eye,  lighting  on  it  from  the  heights,  seeks  a 
sky-line  like  that  of  Clermont  or  Perigueux. 
Aix,  in  this  respect,  remains  inadequate;  yet 
presents  itself  to  closer  inspection  as  a  charming 
faded  old  place,  tinged  with  legal  and  academic 
memories,  with  a  fine  double  row  of  balconied 
and  sculptured  hotels  along  its  leafy  cours,  and  a 
number  of  scattered  treasures  in  the  folds  of  its 
crooked  streets. 

Among  these  treasures  the  two  foremost — the 
picture  of  the  Buisson  Ardent  in  the  cathedral, 
and  the  Gobelin  tapestries  in  the  adjoining  Arch- 
bishop's palace — belong  to  such  widely  sundered 
schools  that  they  might  almost  be  said  to  repre- 
sent the  extreme  points  within  which  French  art 
has  vibrated.  It  is  therefore  the  more  interest- 
ing to  note  that  both  are  intrinsically  and  preemi- 
nently decorative  in  quality — devotional  triptych 
and  frivolous  tapestry  obeying  the  same  law  of 
rigorously  balanced  lines  and  colours.  The 
great  picture  of  the  Burning  Bush  is,  with  the  ex- 
ception of  the  Virgin  of  Moulins,  perhaps  the 
finest  flower  of  that  early  French  school  of  paint- 
ing which  was  so  little  known  or  considered  that, 
until  the  recent  Paris  exhibition  of  "  Primitives," 

[127J 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

many  of  its  masterpieces  were  complacently  at- 
tributed to  Italian  painters.  Hanging  midway 
down  the  nave,  where  a  golden  light  strikes  it 
when  the  sacristan  flings  open  the  splendid 
carved  doors  of  the  west  front,  the  triptych  of 
Nicholas  Froment  unfolds  itself  like  a  great  three- 
petalled  flower,  each  leaf  burning  with  a  rich 
limpidity  of  colour  that  overflows  from  the  Rosa 
Mystica  of  the  central  panel  to  the  pale  prayerful 
faces  of  the  royal  donators  in  the  wings. 

The  cathedral  has  its  tapestries  also — a  series 
from  the  Brussels  looms,  attributed  to  Quentin 
Matsys,  and  covering  the  choir  with  intricately 
composed  scenes  from  the  life  of  Christ,  in  which 
the  melancholy  grey-green  of  autumn  leaves  is 
mingled  with  deep  jewel-like  pools  of  colour. 
But  these  are  accidental  importations  from 
another  world,  whereas  the  famous  Don  Quixote 
series  in  the  Archbishop's  palace  represents  the 
culminating  moment  of  French  decorative  art. 

They  strike  one  perhaps,  first  of  all — these 
rosy  chatoyantes  compositions,  where  ladies  in 
loosened  bodices  gracefully  prepare  to  be  "sur- 
prised''— as  an  instructive  commentary  on  ec- 
clesiastical  manners   toward   the   close   of  the 

[128] 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

eighteenth  century;  then  one  passes  on  to  ab- 
stract enjoyment  of  their  colour-scheme  and 
balance  of  line,  to  a  delighted  perception  of  the 
way  in  which  they  are  kept  from  being  (as 
tapestries  later  became)  mere  imitations  of  paint- 
ing, and  remain  imprisoned — yet  so  free ! — in  that 
fanciful  textile  world  which  has  its  own  flora  and 
fauna,  its  own  laws  of  colour  and  perspective,  and 
its  own  more-than-Shakespearian  anachronisms 
in  costume  and  architecture. 

From  Aix  to  the  Mediterranean  the  south- 
eastern highway  passes  through  a  land  of  ever- 
increasing  loveliness.  East  of  Aix  the  bare- 
peaked  mountain  of  Sainte  Victoire  dominates 
the  fertile  valley  for  long  miles.  Then  the  her- 
mit-haunted range  of  the  Sainte  Baume  unfolds 
its  wooded  flanks  to  the  south,  the  highway  skirt- 
ing them  as  it  gradually  mounts  to  the  plateau 
where  the  town  of  Saint  Maximin  clusters  about 
its  unfinished  Dominican  church — a  remarkable 
example  of  northern  Gothic  strayed  into  the 
classic  confines  of  Provence. 

Saint  Maximin  owes  its  existence — or  that  part 
of  it  contingent  on  possessing  so  important  a 
church — to  the  ownership  of  the  bones  of  Saint 

[1*9] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

Mary  Magdalen,  whose  supposed  relics  were 
formerly  venerated  in  the  great  Burgundian 
church  of  Vezelay,  but  in  the  thirteenth  century 
were  officially  identified  among  the  treasures  of 
the  Provencal  town.  As  the  penitent  saint  is 
supposed  to  have  spent  her  last  years  in  a  grotto 
on  the  heights  of  the  Sainte  Baume,  it  seems  more 
fitting  that  she  should  now  rest  at  its  foot  than  on 
the  far-off  rock  of  the  Morvan;  and  one  is  glad 
that  the  belief  was  early  enough  established  to 
produce  the  picturesque  anomaly  of  this  fine 
fragment  of  northern  art  planted  against  the 
classic  slopes  of  the  Maritime  Alps. 

The  great  Gothic  church  was  never  finished, 
without  or  within ;  but  in  the  seventeenth  century 
a  renewal  of  devotion  to  Saint  Mary  Magdalen 
caused  the  interior  of  the  choir  to  be  clothed  with 
a  magnificent  revetement  of  wood-carving  in  the 
shape  of  ninety-two  choir-stalls,  recounting  in 
their  sculptured  medallions  the  history  of  the 
Dominican  order,  and  leading  up  to  a  sumptuous 
Berniniesque  high-altar,  all  jasper,  porphyry 
and  shooting  rays  of  gold. 

Saint  Maximin,  though  lying  so  remotely 
among  bare  fields  and  barer  mountains,   still 

[130] 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

shows,  outside  its  church,  some  interesting  traces 
of  former  activity  and  importance.  A  stout  old 
Dominican  monastery  extends  its  long  row  of 
ogival  windows  near  the  church,  and  here  and 
there  a  vigorous  bit  of  ancient  masonry  juts  from 
the  streets — notably  in  the  sprawling  arcades  of 
the  Jewish  quarter,  and  where  certain  fragments 
of  wall  attest  that  the  mountain  village  was  once 
a  strongly  defended  mediaeval  town. 

Beyond  Saint  Maximin  the  route  nationale 
bears  away  between  the  mountains  to  Nice;  but 
at  Brignoles — a  city  of  old  renown,  the  winter 
residence  of  the  Counts  of  Provence — one  may 
turn  southward,  by  Roquebrussanne  and  the 
Chartreuse  of  Montrieux  (where  Petrarch's 
brother  was  abbot),  to  the  radiant  valley  of  the 
Gapeau,  where  the  stream-side  is  already  white 
with  cherry-blossoms,  and  so  at  length  come  out, 
at  Hyeres,  on  the  full  glory  of  the  Mediterranean 
spring. 

One's  first  feeling  is  that  nothing  else  matches 
it — that  no  work  of  man,  no  accumulated  appeal 
of  history,  can  contend  a  moment  against  this 
joy  of  the  eye  so  prodigally  poured  out.  The 
stretch  of  coast  from  Toulon  to  Saint  Tropez,  so 

[131] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

much  less  familiar  to  northern  eyes  than  the  more 
eastern  portion  of  the  Riviera,  has  a  peculiar 
nobility,  a  Virgilian  breadth  of  composition,  in 
marked  contrast  to  the  red-rocked  precipitous 
landscape  beyond.  Looking  out  on  it  from  the 
pine-woods  of  Costebelle,  above  Hyeres,  one  is 
beset  by  classic  allusions,  analogies  of  the  golden 
age — so  divinely  does  the  green  plain  open  to  the 
sea,  between  mountain  lines  of  such  Attic  purity. 
After  packed  weeks  of  historic  and  archaeolog- 
ical sensation  this  surrender  to  the  spell  of  the 
landscape  tempts  one  to  indefinite  idling.  It  is 
the  season  when,  through  the  winter  verdure  of 
the  Riviera,  spring  breaks  with  a  hundred  tender 
tints — pale  green  of  crops,  white  snow  of  fruit- 
blossoms,  and  fire  of  scarlet  tulips  under  the  grey 
smoke  of  olive-groves.  From  heights  among  the 
cork-trees  the  little  towns  huddled  about  their 
feudal  keeps  blink  across  the  pine-forests  at  the 
dazzling  blue-and-purple  indentations  of  the 
coast.  And  between  the  heights  mild  valleys 
widen  down — valleys  with  fields  of  roses,  acres 
of  budding  vine,  meadows  sown  with  narcissus, 
and  cold  streams  rushing  from  the  chestnut 
forests  below  the  bald  grey  peaks.     Among  the 

[132] 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

peaks  are  lonely  hermitages,  ruined  remains  of 
old  monastic  settlements,  Carthusian  and  Bene- 
dictine ;  but  no  great  names  are  attached  to  these 
fallen  shrines,  and  the  little  towns  below  have 
no  connection  with  the  main  lines  of  history. 
It  is  all  a  tranquil  backwater,  thick  with  local 
tradition,  little  floating  fragments  of  association 
and  legend ;  but  art  and  history  seem  to  have  held 
back  from  it,  as  from  some  charmed  Elysian 
region,  too  calm,  too  complete,  to  be  rudely 
touched  to  great  issues. 

It  was  the  mistral  that  drove  us  from  this 
Eden,  poisoning  it  with  dust  and  glare,  and 
causing  us  to  take  refuge  north  of  the  sea-board 
Alps.  There,  in  a  blander  air  and  on  a  radiant 
morning,  we  left  Aix  behind,  and  followed  the 
Durance  to  Avignon.  Approaching  the  papal 
city  from  the  east,  one  may  get  a  memorable  im- 
pression by  following  the  outer  circuit  of  its  walls 
to  the  Porte  de  l'Ouille,  which  opens  on  the 
Place  Crillon  just  below  the  great  rock  of  the 
palace.  Seen  thus  from  without,  Avignon  is  like 
a  toy  model  of  a  mediaeval  city;  and  this  im- 
pression  of  artificial   completeness   is  renewed 

[133] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

when,  from  the  rock-perched  terrace  below  the 
palace,  one  looks  out  on  the  Rhone  valley  and  its 
enclosing  amphitheatre  of  mountains.  In  the 
light  Provencal  air,  which  gives  a  finely  pencilled 
precision  to  the  remotest  objects,  the  landscape 
has  an  extraordinarily  topographical  character, 
an  effect  of  presenting  with  a  pre-Raphaelite  in- 
sistence on  detail  its  sharp-edged  ruins,  its  tur- 
reted  bridge,  its  little  walled  towns  on  definite 
points  of  rock.  The  river  winding  through  the 
foreground  holds  its  yellow  curve  between  thin 
fringes  of  poplar  and  sharp  calcareous  cliffs ;  and 
even  the  remoter  hills  have  the  clear  silhouette 
of  the  blue  peaks  in  mediaeval  miniatures,  the 
shoulder  of  the  Mont  Ventoux  rising  above  them 
to  the  north  with  the  firmness  of  an  antique 
marble. 

This  southern  keenness  of  edge  gives  even  to 
the  Gothicism  of  the  piled-up  church  and  palace 
an  exotic,  trans-Alpine  quality,  and  makes  the 
long  papal  ownership  of  Avignon — lasting,  it  is 
well  to  remember,  till  the  general  upheaval  of 
1790 — a  visible  and  intelligible  fact.  Though 
the  Popes  of  Avignon  were  Frenchmen,  Avignon 
is   unmistakably,   almost   inexplicably,   Italian: 

[134] 


TOULON:     THE  HOUSE  OF  PUGET 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

its  Gothic  vaguely  suggests  that  of  the  Ponte 
Sant'  Angelo,  of  the  fortified  arches  and  tombs 
of  mediaeval  Rome,  and  reconciles  itself  as  easily 
to  the  florid  facade  of  the  seventeenth-century 
Papal  Mint  in  the  square  below  as  to  the  delicate 
classic  detail  of  the  west  door  of  the  church. 

Rome — but  Imperial  not  Papal  Rome — was 
still  in  the  air  as  we  left  Avignon  and  followed  the 
Rhone  valley  northward  to  Orange.  All  this 
part  of  France  is  thick  with  history,  and  in  the 
ancient  principality  of  Orange  the  layers  are 
piled  so  deep  that  one  wonders  to  see  so  few 
traces  of  successive  dominations  in  the  outward 
aspect  of  its  capital.  Only  the  Rome  of  the 
Emperors  has  left  a  mark  on  the  town  which  lived 
with  so  vigorous  and  personal  life  from  the  days 
when  it  was  a  Gaulish  city  and  a  trading  station 
of  Massaliote  Greeks,  and  which,  when  it  grew 
too  small  for  its  adventurous  brood,  sent  rulers 
to  both  shores  of  the  North  Sea;  and  the  fact  that 
the  theatre  and  the  arch  survive,  while  the  Orange 
of  Carlovingian  bishops  and  mediaeval  princes 
has  been  quite  wiped  out,  and  even  Maurice  of 
Nassau's  great  seventeenth-century  fortress  razed 
to  the  ground — this  permanence  of  the  imperial 

[135] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

monuments,  rising  unshaken  through  the  blown 
dust  of  nearly  a  thousand  years,  gives  a  tangible 
image  of  the  way  in  which  the  Roman  spirit 
has  persisted  through  the  fluctuations  of  history. 

To  learn  that  these  very  monuments  have  been 
turned  to  base  uses  by  barbarous  prince-bishops 
— the  arch  converted  into  a  fortified  Chateau  de 
l'Arc,  the  theatre  into  an  outwork  of  the  main 
fortress — adds  impressiveness  to  their  mutilated 
splendour,  awing  one  with  the  image  of  a  whole 
reconstructed  from  such  fragments. 

Among  these,  the  theatre,  now  quite  stripped 
of  ornament,  produces  its  effect  only  by  means  of 
its  size,  and  of  the  beautiful  sweep  of  its  converg- 
ing lines;  but  the  great  golden-brown  arch — 
standing  alone  in  a  wide  grassy  square — keeps 
on  three  sides  a  Corinthian  mask  of  cornice  and 
column,  and  a  rich  embossing  of  fruit  and  flower- 
garlands,  of  sirens,  trophies  and  battle-scenes. 
All  this  decoration  is  typically  Roman — vigor- 
ously carved  and  somewhat  indiscriminately 
applied.  One  looks  in  vain  for  the  sensitive  orna- 
ment of  the  arch  of  Saint  Remy,  in  which 
Merimee's  keen  eye  saw  a  germ  of  the  coming 
Gothic:  the  sculpture  of  Orange  follows  the  con- 

[136] 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

ventional  lines  of  its  day,  without  showing  a  hint 
of  new  forms.  But  that  very  absence  of  imagina- 
tive suggestion  makes  it  Roman  and  imperial  to 
the  core. 

Ahead  of  us,  all  the  way  from  Avignon  to 
Orange,  the  Mont  Ventoux  lifted  into  the  pure 
light  its  denuded  flanks  and  wrinkled  silvery- 
lilac  summit.  But  at  Orange  we  turned  about 
its  base,  and  bore  away  north-eastward  through 
a  broken  country  rimmed  with  hills,  passing  by 
Tulette,  the  seat  of  a  Cluniac  foundation — of 
which  the  great  Rovere,  Julius  II.,  was  Prince 
and  Prior — and  by  Valreas,  which  under  the 
Popes  of  Avignon  became  the  capital  of  the 
Haut  Comtat,  the  French  papal  dominion  in 
France. 

Like  too  many  old  towns  in  this  part  of  France, 
Valreas,  once  a  strongly  fortified  place,  has  suf- 
fered its  castle  to  fall  in  ruins,  and  swept  away 
its  towers  and  ramparts  to  make  room  for  boule- 
vards, as  though  eager  to  efface  all  traces  of  its 
long  crowded  past.  But  one  such  trace — nearer 
at  hand  and  of  more  intimate  connotations — re- 
mains in  the  Hotel  de  Simiane,  now  the  hotel  de 
ville,  but  formerly  the  house  of  that  Marquis  de 

[137] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

Simiane  who  married  Pauline  de  Grignan,  the 
grand-daughter  of  Madame  de  Sevigne. 

This  is  the  first  reminder  that  we  are  in  the 
Grignan  country,  and  that  a  turn  of  the  road  will 
presently  bring  us  in  full  view  of  that  high- 
perched  castle  where  the  great  lieutenant- 
governor  of  Provence,  Madame  de  Sevigne's 
son-in-law,  dispensed  an  almost  royal  hospitality 
and  ruled  with  more  than  royal  arrogance. 

The  Comte  de  Grignan  was  counted  a  proud 
man,  and  there  was  much  to  foster  pride  in  the 
site  and  aspect  of  his  ancestral  castle — ce  chateau 
royal  de  Grignan.  If  Italy,  and  papal  Italy,  has 
been  in  one's  mind  at  every  turn  of  the  way  from 
Avignon  to  Tulette,  it  seems  actually  to  rise  be- 
fore one  as  the  great  ruin,  springing  suddenly 
from  its  cliff  in  the  plain,  evokes  a  not  too  auda- 
cious comparison  with  the  rock  of  Caprarola. 
In  France,  at  least,  there  is  perhaps  nothing  as 
suggestive  of  the  fortified  pleasure-houses  of 
Italy  as  this  gallant  castle  on  the  summit  of  its 
rock,  with  the  town  clustering  below,  and  the 
vast  terrace  before  it  actually  forming  the  roof 
of  its  church.  And  the  view  from  the  terrace  has 
the  same  illimitable  sun-washed  spaces,  flowing 

[138] 


QRIQNAN:     GATE  OF  THE  CASTLE 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

on  every  side  into  noble  mountain-forms,  from 
the  Mont  Ventoux  in  the  south  to  the  range  of 
the  Ardeche  in  the  west. 

The  ancient  line  of  Adh&nar,  created  Counts 
of  Grignan  by  Henri  II.,  had  long  been  estab- 
lished on  their  rocky  pedestal  when  they  built 
themselves,  in  the  sixteenth  century,  the  mag- 
nificent Renaissance  facade  of  which  only  the 
angle  towers  now  subsist.  Later  still  they  added 
the  great  gallery  lined  with  full-length  portraits 
of  the  Adhemar,  and  under  Louis  XIV.  Mansart 
built  the  so-called  Facade  des  Prelats,  which, 
judging  from  its  remains,  did  not  yield  in  stateli- 
ness  to  any  of  the  earlier  portions  of  the  castle. 
From  this  side  a  fine  flight  of  double  steps  still 
descends  to  a  garden  set  with  statues  and  foun- 
tains; and  beyond  it  lies  the  vast  stone  terrace 
which  forms  the  roof  of  the  collegial  church,  and 
is  continued  by  a  chemin  de  ronde  crowning  the 
lofty  ramparts  on  the  summit  of  the  rock. 

This  princely  edifice  remained  in  unaltered 
splendour  for  sixty  years  after  the  house  of 
Adhemar,  in  the  person  of  Madame  de  Sevigne's 
grandson,  had  died  out,  ruined  and  diminished, 
in  1732.     But  when  the  Revolution  broke,  old 

[139] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

memories  of  the  Comte  de  Grignan's  dealings 
with  his  people — of  unpaid  debts,  extorted  loans, 
obscure  lives  devoured  by  the  greedy  splendour 
on  the  rock — all  these  recollections,  of  which  one 
may  read  the  record  in  various  family  memoirs, 
no  doubt  increased  the  fury  of  the  onslaught 
which  left  the  palace  of  the  Adhemar  a  blackened 
ruin.  If  there  are  few  spots  in  France  where  one 
more  deeply  resents  the  senseless  havoc  of  the 
Revolution,  there  are  few  where,  on  second 
thoughts,  one  so  distinctly  understands  what 
turned  the  cannon  on  the  castle. 

The  son-in-law  of  Madame  de  Sevigne  was 
the  most  exorbitant  as  he  was  the  most  distin- 
guished of  his  race;  and  it  was  in  him  that  the 
splendour  and  disaster  of  the  family  culminated. 
But  probably  no  visions  of  future  retribution  dis- 
turbed the  charming  woman  who  spent — a  victim 
to  her  maternal  passion — her  last  somewhat  mel- 
ancholy years  in  the  semi-regal  isolation  of 
Grignan.  No  one  but  La  Bruyere  seems,  in  that 
day,  to  have  noticed  the  "swarthy  livid  animal, 
crouched  over  the  soil,  which  he  digs  and  turns 
with  invincible  obstinacy,  but  who,  when  he 
rises  to  his  feet,  shows  a  human  countenance' " — 

p40] 


THE  PYRENEES  TO  PROVENCE 

certainly  he  could  not  be  visible,  toiling  so  far 
below,  from  that  proud  terrace  of  the  Adhemar 
which  makes  the  church  its  footstool.  Least  of 
all  would  he  be  perceptible  to  the  eyes — on  other 
lines  so  discerning! — of  the  lady  whose  gaze, 
when  not  on  her  daughter's  face,  remained  pas- 
sionately fixed  on  the  barrier  of  northern  moun- 
tains, and  the  highway  that  ran  through  them  to 
Paris.  Paris!  Grignan  seems  far  enough  from 
it  even  now — what  an  Ultima  Thule,  a  land  of 
social  night,  it  must  have  been  in  the  days  when 
Madame  de  Sevigne's  heavy  travelling  carriage 
had  to  bump  over  six  hundred  miles  of  rutty 
road  to  reach  the  doors  of  the  Hotel  Carnavalet ! 
One  had  to  suffer  Grignan  for  one's  adored 
daughter's  sake — to  put  up,  as  best  one  could, 
with  the  clumsy  civilities  of  the  provincial  nobil- 
ity, and  to  console  one's  self  by  deliciously  ridi- 
culing the  pretensions  of  Aix  society — but  it  was 
an  exile,  after  all,  and  the  ruined  rooms  of  the 
castle,  and  the  long  circuit  of  the  chemin  de  ronde, 
are  haunted  by  the  wistful  figure  of  the  poor  lady 
who,  though  in  autumn  she  could  extol  the 
"  sugary  white  figs,  the  Muscats  golden  as  amber, 
the  partridges  flavoured  with  thyme  and  mar- 

[141] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

joram,  and  all  the  scents  of  our  sachets,"  yet 
reached  her  highest  pitch  of  eloquence  when,  with 
stiff  fingers  and  shuddering  pen,  she  pictured  the 
unimaginable  February  cold,  the  "awful  beauty 
of  winter,"  the  furious  unchained  Rhone,  and 
"the  mountains  charming  in  their  excess  of 
horror." 


[142] 


VALENCE:     THE  CATHEDRAL 


rv 

THE   RHONE   TO   THE   SEINE 

FROM  Mont&imar  to  Lyons  the  "great 
north  road"  to  Paris  follows  almost  con- 
tinuously the  east  shore  of  the  Rhone,  looking 
across  at  the  feudal  ruins  that  stud  the  opposite 
cliffs.  The  swift  turns  of  the  river,  and  the 
fantastic  outline  of  these  castle-crowned  rocks, 
behind  which  hang  the  blue  lines  of  the  Cevennes, 
compose  a  foreground  suggestive  in  its  wan 
colour  and  abrupt  masses  of  the  pictures  of 
Patinier,  the  strange  Flemish  painter  whose 
ghostly  calcareous  landscapes  are  said  to  have 
been  the  first  in  which  scenery  was  painted  for 
scenery's  sake.  In  all  the  subtler  elements  of 
beauty,  as  well  as  in  the  power  of  historic  sug- 
gestion, this  Rhone  landscape  far  surpasses  that 
of  the  Rhine;  but,  like  many  of  the  most  beauti- 
ful regions  of  France,  it  has  a  quality  of  aloofness, 
of  almost  classic  reserve,  that  defends  it  from  the 
inroads  of  the  throng. 

[143] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

Midway  to  Lyons,  Valence,  the  capital  of 
Csesar  Borgia's  Valentinois,  rises  above  the  river, 
confronted,  on  the  opposite  shore,  by  a  wild  cliff 
bearing  the  ruined  stronghold  of  Crussol,  the 
cradle  of  the  house  of  Uzes.  The  compact  little 
Romanesque  cathedral  of  Saint  Etienne,  scantily 
adorned  by  the  light  exterior  arcade  of  its  nave, 
is  seated  on  an  open  terrace  overlooking  the 
Rhone.  As  sober,  but  less  mellow,  within,  it 
offers — aside  from  the  monument  to  Pius  VI., 
who  ended  his  troubled  days  here — only  the 
comparatively  recondite  interest  of  typical  con- 
structive detail ;  and  the  impressionist  sight-seer 
is  likely  to  wander  out  soon  to  the  little  square 
beyond  the  apse. 

Here  stands  "Le  Pendentif,"  a  curious  little 
vaulted  building  of  the  Renaissance,  full  of  the 
note  of  character,  though  its  original  purpose 
seems  to  be  the  subject  of  archaeological  debate. 
Like  many  buildings  of  this  part  of  the  Rhone 
valley,  it  was  unhappily  constructed  of  a  stone 
on  which  the  wear  of  the  weather  might  suggest 
the  literal  action  of  the  "tooth  of  Time" — so 
scarred  and  gnawed  is  the  whole  charming  fabric. 
As  to  its  original  use,  it  appears  to  have  been  the 

[144] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

mortuary  chapel  of  the  noble  family  whose  arms 
are  discernible  among  the  incongruous  animals 
of  its  decaying  sculpture;  for  it  is  part  of  the 
strangeness  of  the  little  monument  that  the 
spandrils  of  its  elegant  classic  order  are  inhabited 
by  a  rude  Romanesque  fauna  which,  combined 
with  the  dusky  hue  and  ravaged  surface  of  the 
stone,  confers  on  it,  in  contrast  to  the  rejuve- 
nated church,  a  look  of  mysterious  antiquity. 

A  few  yards  off,  down  a  dark  narrow  street, 
the  same  savour  of  the  past  is  found  in  one  of 
those  minor  relics  which  let  the  observer  so 
much  deeper  into  by-gone  institutions  than  the 
study  of  their  official  monuments.  This  is  sim- 
ply an  old  private  house  of  the  early  Renaissance, 
with  a  narrow  sculptured  court-yard,  a  twisting 
staircase,  and  vaulted  stone  passages  and  rooms 
of  singularly  robust  construction.  It  is  still — 
appropriately  enough — inhabited  by  une  ires 
vieille  dame  who  has  receded  so  deeply  into  the 
farthest  convolution  of  her  stout  stone  shell  that 
her  friendly  portress  had  leave  to  conduct  us  from 
basement  to  attic,  giving  us  glimpses  of  dusky 
chambers  with  meagre  venerable  furniture,  and 
of  kitchens  and  offices  with  stone  floors,  scoured 

[145] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

coppers  and  pots  of  herbs,  all  so  saturated  with 
the  old  concentrated  life  of  provincial  France 
that  it  was  like  lifting  to  one's  lips  a  glass  of  some 
ancient  wine  just  at  the  turning-point  of  its 
perfection. 

Not  far  from  Valence,  Tournon  springs  ro- 
mantically from  a  cliff  of  the  west  bank,  sur- 
mounted by  the  ducal  castle  of  Soubise;  and 
the  next  strong  impression  comes  where  Vienne, 
proudest  of  Rhone  towns,  lifts  its  flamboyant 
cathedral  on  a  vast  flight  of  steps  above  the  river. 
The  site  of  Vienne,  and  its  long  Roman  past,  pre- 
pare one  for  more  interest  of  detail  than  a  closer 
inspection  reveals.  The  Roman  temple,  which 
may  once  have  rivalled  the  Maison  Carre'e,  was 
in  the  Middle  Ages  (like  the  temple  of  Syracuse) 
incorporated  in  a  Christian  church,  and  now, 
extricated  lifeless  from  this  fatal  embrace,  pre- 
sents itself  as  an  impersonal  block  of  masonry 
from  which  all  significance  of  detail  is  gone. 
The  cathedral,  too,  has  suffered  in  the  same  way, 
though  from  other  causes.  In  its  early  days  it 
was  savagely  mutilated  by  the  Huguenots,  and 
since  then  the  weather,  eating  deeply  into  its 
friable  stone,  has  wrought  such  havoc  with  the 

[146] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

finery  and  frippery  of  the  elaborate  west  front 
that  the  exterior  attracts  attention  only  as  a 
stately  outline. 

All  the  afternoon  we  had  followed  the  Rhone 
under  a  cloudy  sky;  and  as  we  crossed  the  river 
at  Vienne  the  clouds  broke,  and  we  pushed  north- 
ward through  a  deluge.  Our  day  had  been  a 
long  one,  with  its  large  parenthesis  at  Grignan, 
and  the  rainy  twilight  soon  closed  in  on  us, 
blotting  out  the  last  miles  of  the  approach  to 
Lyons.  But  even  this  disappointment  had  its 
compensations,  for  in  the  darkness  we  took  a 
wrong  turn,  coming  out  on  a  high  suburb  of  the 
west  bank,  with  the  city  outspread  below  in  a 
wide  network  of  lights  against  its  holy  hill  of 
Fourviere.  Lyons  passes,  I  believe,  for  the  most 
prosaic  of  great  French  towns;  but  no  one  can 
so  think  of  it  who  descends  on  it  thus  through  the 
night,  seeing  its  majestic  bridges  link  quay  to 
quay,  and  the  double  sweep  of  the  river  reflecting 
the  million  lights  of  its  banks. 

It  was  still  raining  when  we  continued  on  our 
journey  the  next  day ;  but  the  clouds  broke  as  we 
climbed  the  hill  above  Lyons,  and  we  had  some 

[147] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

fine  backward  glimpses  of  the  Rhone  before 
our  road  began  to  traverse  the  dull  plain  of  the 
Bresse. 

So  rest,  for  ever  rest,  O  princely  pair! 
If  the  lines  have  pursued  one  from  childhood, 
the  easiest — and,  alas,  the  most  final! — way  of 
laying  their  lovely  spectre  is  to  turn  aside  from 
the  road  to  Dijon  and  seek  out  the  church  of 
Brou.  To  do  so,  one  must  journey  for  two  or 
three  hours  across  one  of  the  flat  stretches  of 
central  France;  and  the  first  disillusionment 
comes  when  Brou  itself  is  found  to  be  no  more 
than  a  faubourg  of  the  old  capital  of  the  Bresse — 
the  big,  busy,  cheese-making  town  of  Bourg, 
sprawling  loosely  among  boundless  pastures,  and 
detaining  one  only  by  the  graceful  exterior  of  its 
somewhat  heterogeneous  church. 

A  straight  road  runs  thence  through  dusty 
outskirts  to  the  shrine  of  Margaret  of  Austria, 
and  the  heart  of  the  sentimentalist  sank  as  we 
began  to  travel  it.  Here,  indeed,  close  to  the 
roadside,  stood  "the  new  pile,"  looking  as  new 
as  it  may  have  when,  from  her  white  palfrey,  the 
widowed  Duchess  watched  her  "  Flemish  carvers, 
Lombard  gilders"  at  work;  looking,  in  fact,  as 

[148] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

scrubbed,  scraped  and  soaped  as  if  its  renovation 
were  a  feat  daily  performed  by  the  "seven  maids 
with  seven  mops"  on  whose  purifying  powers  the 
walrus  so  ingeniously  speculated.  Matthew  Ar- 
nold's poem  does  not  prepare  the  reader  for  the 
unnatural  gloss  which  makes  the  unhappy  monu- 
ment look  like  a  celluloid  toy.  Perhaps  when 
he  saw  it  the  cleansing  process  had  not  begun — 
but  did  he  ever  really  see  it  ?  And  if  so,  where 
did  he  see  the 

Savoy  mountain  meadows, 

By  the  stream  below  the  pines  ? 

And  how  could  he  have  pictured  the  Duchess 
Margaret  as  being  "in  the  mountains"  while 
she  was  supervising  the  work?  Or  the  "Alpine 
peasants"  as  climbing  "up  to  pray"  at  the  com- 
pleted shrine,  or  the  priest  ascending  to  it  by  the 
"mountain- way"  from  the  walled  town  "below 
the  pass"? 

Is  Bourg  the  walled  town,  and  its  dusty 
faubourg  the  pass?  And  shall  we,  when  we 
pass  under  the  traceries  of  the  central  door,  and 
stand  beneath  the  vaulting  of  the  nave,  hear 
overhead  the  "wind  washing  through  the  moun- 

[149] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

tain  pines"?  It  will  have  to  travel  a  long  way 
to  make  itself  heard! 

Poor  Lady  Mary  Wortley  Montagu,  so  ma- 
ligned for  her  imaginative  pictures  of  Lovere  and 
Lake  Iseo,  may  surely  be  forgiven  for  having 
gilded  the  lily,  for  adding  an  extra  touch  of 
romance  where  the  romantic  already  so  abound- 
ed ;  but  it  is  less  easy  to  explain  how  the  poet  of 
the  church  of  Brou  could  evoke  out  of  the  dusty 
plain  of  the  Bresse  his  pine-woods,  streams  and 
mountains.  Perhaps  (the  pilgrim  reflects)  the 
explanation  will  be  found  within  the  church,  and 
standing  in  the  magic  light  of  the  "vast  western 
window'*  we  too  shall  hear  the  washing  of  the 
wind  in  the  pines,  and  understand  why  it  travelled 
so  far  to  reach  the  poet's  ear. 

In  this  hope  we  enter;  but  only  to  discover 
that  inside  also  the  archaeological  mops  have 
been  at  work,  and  that  the  elaborate  lining 
of  the  shrine  is  as  scoured  and  shiny  as  its  ex- 
terior. Well !  let  us  affront  this  last  disenchant- 
ment— and  the  little  additional  one  of  buying  a 
ticket  for  the  choir  from  a  gold-braided  custodian 
at  a  desk  in  the  nave — and  closing  our  eyes  to  the 
secularised,  museumised  aspect  of  the  monu- 

[150] 


BROU:     TOMB  OF  MARGARET  OF  AUSTRIA  IN  THE  CHURCH 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

ment,  try  to  open  them  to  a  vision  of  what  it  may 
have  been  before  it  was  turned  into  a  show. 

Alas !  even  this  last  effort — this  bon  mouvement 
of  the  imagination — fails  to  restore  an  atmos- 
phere of  poetry  to  the  church  of  Brou,  to  put  it  in 
any  other  light  than  that  of  a  kind  of  superlative 
"Albert  Memorial,"  in  which  regardlessness  of 
cost  has  frankly  predominated  over  aesthetic  con- 
siderations. Yet  it  is  manifestly  unfair  to  charge 
the  Duchess  Margaret  with  the  indiscrimination 
of  the  parvenu.  One  should  rather  ascribe  to 
special  conditions  of  time  and  place  that  stifling 
confusion  of  ornament,  that  air  of  being,  as 
Bacon  puts  it,  so  terribly  "daubed  with  cost," 
which  is  both  the  first  effect  and  the  final  outcome 
of  an  inspection  of  Brou.  If  Arnold  gave  the 
rein  to  fancy  in  his  mise-en-scene,  he  was  quite 
exact  in  picturing  the  conditions  in  which  the 
monument  was  produced,  and  his  enumeration 
of  the  "Flemish  carvers,  Lombard  gilders,  Ger- 
man masons,  smiths  from  Spain"  who  collabo- 
rated in  its  making,  reminds  one  that  artistic 
unity  could  hardly  result  from  so  random  an  as- 
sociation of  talents.  It  was  characteristic  of  the 
time,  of  the  last  boiling-over  of  the  heterogeneous 

[151] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

Gothic  pot,  that  this  strange  fellowship  was  not 
felt  to  be  any  obstacle  to  the  production  of  a  work 
of  art.  One  sees  the  same  result  in  almost  all 
the  monuments  of  the  period,  especially  where 
the  Spanish-Netherlands  influence  has  added  a 
last  touch  of  profusion — and  confusion.  How 
could  an  art  so  evolved  issue  in  anything  but  a 
chaos  of  overdone  ornament?  How  could  line 
survive  in  such  a  deluge  of  detail  ?  The  church 
of  Brou  is  simply  the  most  distressing  because 
the  most  expensive  product  of  the  period.  Ex- 
piring Gothic  changed  its  outline  as  often  as 
the  dying  dolphin  is  supposed  to  change  his 
colours — every  ornament  suggests  a  convulsion  in 
stone. 

And  on  all  this  extravagance  of  design,  which 
could  be  redeemed  only  by  the  lightest  touch  of 
the  chisel,  lies  the  heavy  hand  of  the  Flemish 
sculptor.  Is  it  possible  that  the  same  phase  of 
artistic  feeling  produced  the  three  tombs  of  Brou 
and  those  of  the  Dukes  of  Burgundy  at  Dijon  ? 
Certainly,  at  least,  tfie  same  hand  did  not  carve 
them.  At  Brou  the  innumerable  subordinate 
figures — angels,  mourners  and  the  rest — are 
turned  out  with  the  unerring  facility  of  the  pastry- 

[152] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

cook's  art:  they  represent  the  highest  achieve- 
ment in  sugar  and  white  of  egg.  At  Dijon,  on 
the  contrary,  each  pleureur  in  the  arcade  beneath 
the  tomb  of  Duke  Philip  is  a  living,  sentient 
creature,  a  mourner  whose  grief  finds  individual 
utterance.  Is  there  anything  in  plastic  art  that 
more  vividly  expresses  the  passionate  mediaeval 
brooding  over  death  ?  Each  little  cowled  figure 
takes  his  grief,  his  sense  of  the  neant,  in  his  own 
way.  Some  are  wrung  and  bowed  with  it.  One 
prays.  Another,  a  serene  young  man,  walks 
apart  with  head  bent  above  his  book — the  page 
of  a  Stoic,  one  conjectures.  And  so  each,  in  his 
few  inches  of  marble,  and  in  the  confinement  of 
his  cramped  little  niche,  typifies  a  special  aspect 
of  the  sense  of  mortality — above  all  of  its  loneli- 
ness, the  way  it  must  be  borne  without  help. 

The  thought  came  to  one,  the  next  day  at 
Dijon,  the  more  vividly  by  contrast  to  the  simper- 
ing sorrow  of  Brou.  The  tombs  of  the  dukes  of 
Burgundy,  so  cruelly  torn  from  the  hallowed 
twilight  of  the  Chartreuse,  and  exposed  to  the 
cold  illumination  of  museum  windows,  give  one, 
even  in  this  impersonal  light,  a  strong  sense  of 

[153] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

personality.  Even  the  overladen  detail  of  the 
period,  the  aimless  striving  of  its  frets  and  finials, 
cannot  obscure  the  serious  purity  of  the  central 
conception ;  and  one  is  led  to  the  conclusion  that 
a  touch  of  free  artistic  emotion  will  break  through 
the  strongest  armour  of  stock  formulas. 

One  sees  them,  of  course,  the  ducal  tombs,  in 
a  setting  in  a  certain  sense  their  own,  since  this 
privileged  city,  in  addition  to  its  other  distinc- 
tions, has  a  mediaeval  palace  for  its  museum,  and 
the  mailed  heels  of  the  recumbent  dukes  may 
have  rung  on  the  stone  flagging  of  the  Salle  des 
Gardes  where  they  now  lie.  But  the  great 
vaulted  hall  has  ceased  to  be  a  guard-room,  as 
they  have  ceased  to  be  its  lords,  and  the  trail  of 
label  and  number,  of  velvet  cord  and  iron  rail,  is 
everywhere  in  their  democratised  palace.  It  is 
noteworthy,  therefore,  that,  as  the  tombs  have 
retained  so  much  of  their  commemorative  value, 
so  the  palace  itself  has  yielded  as  little  as  might 
be  of  its  private  character  to  the  encroachments 
of  publicity:  appearing  almost,  as  one  wanders 
from  one  bright  room  to  another,  like  the  house 
of  a  great  collector  who  still  lives  among  his 
treasures. 

[154] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

This  felicitous  impression  is  partly  due  to  the 
beauty  of  the  old  building,  and  partly  also  to  the 
fact  that  it  houses  a  number  of  small  collections, 
the  spoils  of  local  dilettanti,  each  kept  together, 
however  diversified  its  elements,  so  that  many  of 
the  rooms  exhibit  a  charming  habitable  mingling 
of  old  furniture,  old  porcelain  and  the  small  un- 
obtrusive pictures  that  are  painted  to  be  lived 
with,  not  glanced  up  at  from  a  catalogue. 

The  impression  of  happy  coincidences,  of 
really  providential  accidents,  which  gives  such 
life  to  the  bright  varied  museum,  persists  and 
deepens  as  one  passes  from  it  into  the  town — 
the  astonishing  town  which  seems  to  sum  up  in 
itself  almost  every  phase  of  French  art  and  his- 
tory. Even  the  deep  soil  of  France  has  hardly 
another  spot  where  the  past  grows  so  thick  and  so 
vigorously,  where  the  ancient  growths  lift  such 
hale  heads  to  the  sunlight.  The  continuity  of 
life  at  Dijon  is  as  striking  as  its  diversity  and  its 
individuality.  Old  Dijon  is  not  an  archipelago 
of  relics  in  a  sea  of  modern  houses:  it  is  like  a 
vascular  system,  binding  the  place  together  in  its 
network  of  warm  veins,  and  seeming,  not  to  be 
kept  alive,  but  to  be  keeping  life  in  the  city. 

[155] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

It  is  to  this  vivid  synthesis  of  the  past  that  one 
reverts  from  even  the  strongest  single  impressions 
— from  the  civic  sumptuousness  of  the  Palais  de 
Justice,  the  elegance  of  the  Hotel  de  Vogue,  the 
mysterious  symbolism  of  the  jutting  row  of 
gargoyles  on  the  west  front  of  Notre  Dame — 
suffering  them  to  merge  themselves,  these  and 
many  more,  into  a  crowded  splendid  tapestry, 
the  mere  background  of  the  old  city's  continu- 
ous drama  of  ducal,  Imperial,  parliamentary 
life. 

The  same  impression  of  richness,  of  deep  as- 
similated experience,  accompanies  one  on  the 
way  north  through  the  Burgundian  province — 
giving  to  the  trivial  motorist,  the  mere  snarer  of 
haphazard  impressions,  so  annihilating  a  sense  of 
his  inability  to  render  even  a  superficial  account 
of  what  he  sees,  and  feels  beneath  the  thing  seen, 
that  there  comes  a  moment  when  he  is  tempted 
to  take  refuge  in  reporting  the  homely  luxury 
of  the  inns — though  even  here  the  abundance 
of  matter  becomes  almost  as  difficult  to  deal 
with. 

It  is  for  this  reason,  perhaps,  that  after  a 
morning   among   the   hills   and   valleys   of   the 

[156] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

Morvan,  in  sight,  almost  continuously,  of  that 
astonishing  Burgundian  canal,  with  its  long  lines 
of  symmetrical  poplars,  its  massive  masonry,  its 
charming  lock-houses,  all  repeating  themselves 
like  successive  states  of  a  precious  etching — that 
after  such  a  morning  I  seek,  and  seem  to  find,  its 
culminating  astonishment  in  the  luncheon  which 
crowned  it  in  the  grimy  dining-room  of  the 
auberge  at  Precy-sous-Thil.  But  was  it  an  aw- 
berge,  even,  and  not  rather  a  gargote,  this  sandy 
onion-scented  "public,"  with  waggoners  and 
soldiers  grouped  cheerfully  about  their  petit  vin 
bleu,  while  a  flushed  hand-maid,  in  repeated 
dashes  from  the  kitchen,  laid  before  us  a  succes- 
sion of  the  most  sophisticated  dishes — the  tender- 
est  filet,  the  airiest  pommes  souffleesy  the  plumpest 
artichokes  that  ever  bloomed  on  the  buffet  of  a 
Parisian  restaurant?  It  corresponded,  at  any 
rate,  to  the  kind  of  place  where,  in  any  Anglo- 
Saxon  country,  one  would  have  found  the  com- 
pany as  prohibitory  as  the  food,  and  each  equally 
a  reason  for  fleeing  as  soon  as  possible  from  the 
other. 

So  it  is  that  Precy-sous-Thil  may  stand  as  a 
modest  symbol  of  the  excessive  amenity  of  this 

[157] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

mellowest  of  French  civilisations — the  more  mem- 
orably to  one  party  of  hungry  travellers  because 
it  formed,  at  the  same  time,  the  final  stage  of 
their  pilgrimage  to  Vezelay. 

That  thought,  indeed,  distracted  us  from  the 
full  enjoyment  of  the  filet,  and  tore  us  from  the 
fragrant  coffee  that  our  panting  waitress  carried 
after  us  to  the  motor's  edge;  for  more  than  half 
the  short  April  day  was  over,  and  we  had  still 
two  hours  of  steep  hill  and  vale  between  our- 
selves and  Vezelay. 

The  remainder  of  the  way  carried  us  through 
a  region  so  romantically  broken,  so  studded  with 
sturdy  old  villages  perched  on  high  ledges  or 
lodged  in  narrow  defiles,  that  but  for  the  expecta- 
tion before  us  every  mile  of  the  way  would  have 
left  an  individual  impression.  But  on  the  road 
to  Vezelay  what  can  one  see  but  Vezelay? 
Nothing,  certainly,  less  challenging  to  the  atten- 
tion than  the  loftily  seated  town  of  Avallon  which, 
midway  of  our  journey,  caught  and  detained  us 
for  a  wondrous  hour. 

The  strain  of  our  time-limit,  and  the  manifold 
charms  of  the  old  town,  so  finely  planted  above 
the  gorge  of  the  Cousin,  had  nearly  caused  us  to 

[US] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

defer  Vezelay,  and  end  our  day's  journey  at  the 
Hotel  du  Chapeau  Rouge.  But  in  the  mild  air, 
and  on  the  extreme  verge  of  the  bright  sky,  there 
was  a  threat  of  rain,  and  the  longing  to  see  the 
great  Benedictine  abbey  against  such  a  sunset  as 
the  afternoon  promised  was  even  stronger  than 
the  spell  of  Avallon.  We  carried  away  therefore 
(with  the  fixed  intention  of  returning)  only  the 
general  impression  of  a  walled  town  set  against 
a  striking  background  of  cliff  and  woodland,  and 
one  small  vivid  vignette  of  a  deserted  square 
where  aged  houses  of  incredible  picturesqueness 
grouped  themselves  at  scenic  angles  about  the 
sculptured  front  of  the  church  of  Saint  Lazare. 
From  Avallon  to  Vezelay  the  road  winds  to  the 
west,  between  the  leafy  banks  of  the  Cousin, 
through  the  town  of  Pontaubert,  with  its  ancient 
church  of  the  Templars,  past  the  bridge  of  the 
Cure,  and  out  at  last  into  the  valley  dominated 
by  the  conical  hill  of  Vezelay.  All  day  the  vision 
of  the  Benedictine  church  had  hung  before  us 
beyond  each  bend  of  the  road;  and  when  at 
length  we  saw  its  mighty  buttresses  and  towers 
clenched  in  the  rock,  above  the  roofs  and  walls 
of  the  abbatial  town,  we  felt  the  impact  of  a  great 

[159] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

sensation — for  the  reality  was  nobler  than  the 
vision. 

The  mere  sight  of  Vezelay  from  the  valley — 
quite  apart  from  the  rush  of  associations  it  sets 
free — produces  the  immediate  effect  of  one  of 
those  perfect  achievements  in  which  art  and 
nature  interpret  and  fulfil  each  other.  The 
church  stands  just  where  such  a  building  should 
stand,  and  looks  as  a  building  should  look  to  be 
worthy  of  such  a  site.  The  landscape  about  it 
has  the  mingled  serenity  and  ruggedness  which 
its  own  lines  express,  and  its  outline  grows  out  of 
the  hill-top  without  a  break  between  the  struct- 
ural harmony  of  the  two. 

Before  mounting  up  to  compare  the  detailed 
impression  with  the  first  effect,  one  is  detained 
by  the  village  of  Saint  Pere  (Pierre)  sous  Vezelay, 
which  lies  just  at  the  foot  of  the  road  leading  up 
to  the  abbey.  Here,  from  a  heap  of  sordid 
houses,  and  among  stifling  barnyard  exhalations, 
rises  the  sweet  worn  old  church  of  Saint  Pierre, 
younger  in  date  than  the  abbey  church  above, 
but  stained  and  seamed  by  time.  From  the 
stone  embroideries  of  its  triple  porch  and  its 
graceful  fantastic  narthex,  it  might  pass,  at  first 

[160  J 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

glance,  for  a  more  than  usually  temperate  speci- 
men of  flamboyant  Gothic;  but  if  one  backs 
away  far  enough  to  take  in  its  whole  outline,  the 
upper  facade  and  the  tower  reveal  themselves  as 
an  exquisite  instance  of  thirteenth-century  transi- 
tion. The  tower,  in  particular,  with  its  light 
ranges  or  arcades,  and  the  slender  trumpeting 
angels  that  so  surprisingly  buttress  its  angles, 
seems,  as  an  observant  traveller  has  already 
noted,  more  Italian  than  Burgundian — though  to 
find  its  match  in  Italy  one  would  have  to  seek,  not 
among  actual  church-towers,  but  in  the  back- 
grounds of  early  Tuscan  pictures,  where,  against 
a  sky  of  gold-leaf,  such  heralds  sound  their  call 
from  the  thatch  of  the  manger. 

After  the  mystical  vision  of  the  bell-tower  of 
Saint  Pere  it  is  almost  a  drop  back  to  prose  to 
climb  the  hill  to  Vezelay  and  stand  before  the 
church  of  the  Magdelen — or  rather  it  is  like  turn- 
ing from  the  raptures  of  Joachim  of  Flora  or 
Hugo  of  Saint  Victor  to  the  close-knit  dialectic 
of  Saint  Thomas  Aquinas.  This  vast  creation  of 
mediaeval  faith  might  indeed  be  likened  to  the 
great  doctrinal  system  out  of  which  it  grew 
— such   a   strong,  tight,  complex   structure,   so 

[161] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

studied,  balanced  and  mathematically  exact  it 
seems. 

It  has  seen,  the  great  church,  in  its  well-nigh 
thousand  years  of  existence,  sights  so  splendid 
and  memorable  that  it  seems  at  first  a  mere  back- 
ground for  its  memories — for  the  figures  of  Saint 
Bernard  and  Becket,  of  Philip  Augustus  and 
Cceur  de  Lion,  with  their  interminable  train  of 
clerical  and  secular  dignitaries,  monks,  nobles, 
doctors  of  the  Church,  and  all  the  wild  impas- 
sioned rout  of  the  second  and  third  Crusades. 
To  have  seen  so  much,  and  now  to  stand  so  far 
apart  from  life!  One  reflects  on  the  happier  fate 
of  those  other  great  churches  of  lay  growth,  the 
French  cathedrals,  whose  hearts  beat  warm  for 
so  many  centuries,  through  so  many  social  and 
political  alternations. 

The  situation  of  the  church  of  Vezelay  typifies 
this  deeper  solitude.  It  stands  alone  on  the 
crest  of  the  hill,  divided  from  the  town  below  by 
a  wide  stony  square.  Behind  the  apse,  where  the 
monastic  buildings  lay,  a  shady  grassy  slope 
simulates  the  privacy  of  an  English  close — and 
on  all  sides  are  the  blue  distances  of  the  Morvan. 
This  loftiness   and   detachment   of  site  give  a 

(J  162] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

peculiar  majesty  to  the  building,  and  conduce  no 
doubt  to  the  impression  that  in  all  church  archi- 
tecture there  is  nothing  quite  like  it,  nothing  in 
which  the  passive  strength  of  the  elder  style  so 
imperceptibly  blends  with  the  springing  grace  of 
the  new.  The  latter  meets  one  first,  in  the  two- 
storied  narthex,  a  church  in  itself,  which  precedes 
the  magnificent  round-arched  portals  of  the  inner 
building,  It  is  from  the  threshold  of  this  narthex 
that,  looking  down  its  lofty  vista,  and  through  the 
triple  doorways  to  the  vast  and  stern  perspective 
of  the  Romanesque  nave,  one  gets  the  keenest  im- 
pression of  the  way  in  which,  in  this  incomparable 
building,  the  two  styles  have  been  wrought  into 
an  accord  that  shows  their  essential  continuity. 
In  the  nave  itself,  with  the  doors  of  the  narthex 
closed,  another,  subtler  impression  awaits  one; 
for  here  one  seems  to  surprise  the  actual  moment 
of  transition,  to  see,  as  nowhere  else,  the  folded 
wings  of  the  Gothic  stirring  under  the  older 
forms. 

More  even  than  its  rich  mysterious  sculptures, 
far  more  than  its  mere  pride  of  size  and  majesty, 
does  this  undefinable  fremissement  of  the  old  static 
Romanesque  lines  remain  with  one  as  the  specific 

[163] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

note  of  Vezelay:  giving  it,  in  spite  of  its  age-long 
desertion,  in  spite  of  the  dead  and  staring  look 
produced  by  indiscriminate  restoration,  an  inner 
thrill  of  vitality,  the  promise  of  "strange  futures 
beautiful  and  young,"  such  as  the  greatest  art 
alone  possesses. 

The  long  spring  sunset  filled  the  sky  when  we 
turned  from  Vezelay  and  began  to  wind  through 
the  valley  of  the  Cure  to  Auxerre.  The  day  had 
been  too  rich  in  impressions  to  leave  space  for 
more  than  a  deep  sense  of  changing  loveliness  as 
we  followed  the  curves  of  the  river  through 
poplar-planted  meadows,  by  white  chalk-cliffs 
and  villages  hanging  on  the  heights.  But  among 
these  fugitive  impressions  is  the  vivid  memory  of 
a  white  railway  viaduct,  so  lightly  yet  securely 
flung  across  the  valley  that  in  the  golden  blur  of 
sunset  it  suggested  one  of  Turner's  dream-bridges 
spanning  a  vale  of  Tempe :  a  notable  instance  of 
the  almost  invariable  art  with  which,  in  French 
engineering,  the  arch  is  still  employed.  After 
that  the  way  grew  indistinct,  and  night  had  fal- 
len when  we  entered  Auxerre — feeling  our  way 
through  a  dimly  lit  suburb,  seeing  the  lights  of 
the  town  multiplied  in  the  quiet  waters  of  the 

[164] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

Yonne,  and  reaching  it  at  last  by  a  bridge  that  led 
straight  to  the  steep  central  street. 

Auxerre,  the  next  day — even  through  the  blind- 
ing rain  which  so  punctually  confirmed  our  fore- 
bodings— revealed  itself  as  one  of  those  close- 
knit,  individual  old  French  towns  that  are  as 
expressive,  as  full  of  vivacity  and  character,  as 
certain  French  faces.  Finely  massed  above  the 
river,  in  a  pile  culminating  with  the  towers  of  the 
cathedral  and  the  detached  shaft  of  Saint  Jean, 
it  confirms,  and  indeed  exceeds,  on  a  nearer  view, 
the  promise  of  its  distant  aspect.  A  town  which 
has  had  the  good  fortune  to  preserve  its  walls  and 
one  or  two  of  its  fortified  gates,  has  always — and 
more  especially  if  seated  on  a  river — the  more 
obvious  opportunities  for  picturesqueness ;  and 
at  Auxerre  the  narrow  streets  rising  from  the 
quay  to  the  central  group  of  buildings  contribute 
many  isolated  effects — carved  door,  steep  gable 
or  opportune  angle-turret — to  the  general  dis- 
tinction of  the  scene. 

The  cathedral  itself  is  the  heart  of  the  charm- 
ing old  place — so  rich  in  tone,  so  impressive  in 
outline,  so  profusely  yet  delicately  adorned,  it 

[165] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

rose  at  the  end  of  the  long  market-square,  shed- 
ding on  it,  even  through  the  grey  sheets  of  rain, 
the  warmth  of  its  high  tawny  masses.  The  de- 
sign of  the  western  front  is  so  full  and  harmoni- 
ous that  it  effaces  from  memory  the  less  salient 
impression  of  the  interior.  Under  a  more  fa- 
vourable light,  which  would  have  brought  out  the 
colours  of  the  rich  clerestory  glass,  and  the 
modelling  of  shafts  and  vaulting,  it  would  have 
seemed,  no  doubt,  less  austere,  more  familiarly 
beautiful;  but  veiled  and  darkened  by  rain- 
clouds  it  offered,  instead  of  colour  and  detail, 
only  an  unfolding  of  cavernous  arches  fading  into 
the  deep  shades  of  the  sanctuary. 

The  adjoining  Bishop's  palace,  with  its  rugged 
Romanesque  arcades  planted  on  a  bit  of  Gallo- 
Roman  city  wall,  and  the  interesting  fragment 
of  the  church  of  Saint  Germain,  beside  the  hos- 
pital, are  among  the  other  notable  monuments  of 
Auxerre ;  but  these  too,  masked  by  the  incessant 
downpour,  remained  in  memory  as  mere  vague 
masses  of  dripping  masonry,  pressed  upon  by  a 
low  black  sky. 

The  rain  pursued  us  northward  from  Auxerre 
along  the  valley  of  the  Yonne,  lifting  a  little  tow- 

[166] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

ard  noon  to  leave  the  landscape  under  that 
grey-green  blur  through  which  the  French 
paysagistes  have  most  persistently  seen  it.  Joig- 
ny,  with  this  light  at  its  softest,  seemed,  even  after 
Auxerre,  one  of  the  most  individual  of  ancient 
French  towns:  its  long  and  stately  quay,  closed 
by  a  fine  gate  at  each  end  of  the  town,  giving  it 
in  especial  a  quite  personal  character,  and  one 
which  presented  itself  as  a  singularly  happy 
solution  of  the  problem  of  linking  a  town  to  its 
river.  Above  the  quay  the  steep  streets  gave 
many  glimpses  of  mediaeval  picturesqueness, 
tucked  away  at  almost  inaccessible  angles;  but 
the  rain  closed  in  on  them,  and  drove  us  on  re- 
luctantly to  Sens. 

Here  the  deluge  hung  a  still  denser  curtain  be- 
tween us  and  the  amenities  of  this  singularly 
charming  town.  Sens,  instead  of  being,  like 
Joigny,  packed  tight  between  river  and  cliff, 
spreads  out  with  relative  amplitude  between 
Roman  ramparts  transformed  into  shady  prome- 
nades; and  about  midway  of  the  town,  at  the 
end  of  a  long  market-place  like  that  of  Auxerre, 
the  cathedral  rears  itself  in  such  nobility  and 
strength  of  line  that  one  instantly  revises  one's 

[167] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

classification  of  the  great  French  churches  to 
make  room  for  this  one  near  the  top. 

Its  beauties  develop  and  multiply  on  a  nearer 
view,  and  its  kinship  with  Canterbury  makes  it, 
to  those  under  the  spell  of  that  noblest  of  English 
choirs,  of  peculiar  architectural  interest.  But 
when  one  has  done  full  justice  to  the  long  un- 
folding of  the  nave,  to  the  delicate  pallour  of 
Cousin's  glass,  and  to  the  associations  attached 
to  the  "altar  of  Becket"  behind  the  choir,  one 
returns  finally  to  the  external  composition  of  the 
apsidal  chapels  as  the  most  memorable  and  per- 
fect thing  at  Sens.  The  development  of  the 
chevet,  which  Romanesque  architecture  be- 
queathed to  Gothic,  is  perhaps  the  happiest 
product  of  the  latter  growth  on  French  soil ;  and 
after  studying  so  complex  an  example  of  its  pos- 
sibilities as  the  apse  of  Sens  presents,  one  feels 
anew  what  English  Gothic  lost  in  committing 
itself  to  the  square  east  end. 

Of  great  historic  interest  is  the  so-called 
Offlcialite  which  adjoins  the  cathedral — a  kind  of 
diocesan  tribunal  built  under  Louis  IX.;  but  its 
pointed  windows  and  floriated  niches  have  been 
so  liberally  restored  that  it  has  the  too  Gothic 

[168] 


SENS:     APSE  OF  THE  CATHEDRAL 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

look  of  a  mediaeval  stage-setting.  Sens  has  many 
other  treasures,  not  only  in  its  unusually  rich 
collection  of  church  relics  and  tapestries,  but 
among  the  fragments  of  architecture  distributed 
through  its  streets;  and  in  the  eighteenth  century 
gates  of  the  archiepiscopal  palace  it  can  show  a 
specimen  of  wrought-iron  work  probably  not  to 
be  matched  short  of  Jean  Lamour's  gates  at 
Nancy. 

One  of  its  most  coveted  possessions — Jean 
Cousin's  famous  picture  of  the  Eva  prima 
Pandora — has  long  been  jealously  secluded  by 
its  present  owner;  and  one  wonders  for  what 
motive  the  inveterate  French  hospitality  to  lovers 
of  art  has  been  here  so  churlishly  reversed.  The 
curious  mystical  interest  of  the  work,  and  its 
value  as  a  link  in  the  history  of  French  painting, 
make  it,  one  may  say,  almost  a  monument  his- 
torique,  a  part  of  the  national  heritage;  and  per- 
haps the  very  sense  of  its  potential  service  to 
art  gives  a  perverse  savour  to  its  possessor's 
peculiar  mode  of  enjoying  it. 

From  Sens  to  Fontainebleau  the  road  follows 
the  valley  of  the  Yonne  through  a  tranquil  land- 
scape with  level  meadows  and  knots  of  slender 

[169] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

trees  along  the  river,  till  the  border  of  the  forest 
is  reached,  and  a  long  green  alley  takes  one 
straight  to  the  granite  cross  on  the  edge  of  the 
town.  Toward  afternoon  the  rain  turned  to  a 
quiet  drizzle,  of  the  kind  that  becomes  the  soft 
French  landscape  as  a  glass  becomes  certain 
pictures;  and  through  it  we  glided  on,  past  the 
mossy  walls  of  great  estates,  past  low-lying  cha- 
teaux, green  pieces  d'eau,  and  the  long  grassy 
vistas  that  are  cut  in  every  direction  through 
the  forests  about  Melun.  This  district  of  big 
"shootings"  and  carefully  tended  preserves  ex- 
tends almost  to  the  outer  ring  of  environs.  Be- 
yond them  Paris  itself  soon  rose  smokily  through 
the  rain,  and  a  succession  of  long  straight  ave- 
nues, as  carefully  planted  as  if  they  had  been  the 
main  arteries  of  a  fashionable  suburb,  led  us 
thence  to  the  Porte  de  Choisy. 

To  be  back  in  the  roar  of  traffic,  to  feel  the 
terrific  pressure  of  those  miles  of  converging 
masonry,  gave  us,  after  weeks  of  free  air  and 
unbounded  landscape,  a  sense  of  congestion  that 
made  the  crowded  streets  seem  lowering  and 
dangerous;  but  as  we  neared  the  river,  and  saw 
before  us  the  curves  of  the  lifted  domes,  the  grey 

IJ170] 


THE  RHONE  TO  THE  SEINE 

strength  of  the  bridges,  and  all  the  amazing 
symmetry  and  elegance  of  what  in  other  cities 
is  mean  and  huddled  and  confused,  the  touch 
of  another  beauty  fell  on  us — the  spell  of  "les 
seuils  sacres,  la  Seine  qui  coule" 


[171] 


PART  III 

A   FLIGHT  TO  THE   NORTH-EAST 

THERE  are  several  ways  of  leaving  Paris  by 
motor  without  touching  even  the  fringe 
of  what,  were  it  like  other  cities,  would  be  called 
its  slums.  Going,  for  instance,  southward  or 
south-westward,  one  may  emerge  from  the 
alleys  of  the  Bois  near  the  Pont  de  Suresnes  and, 
crossing  the  river,  pass  through  the  park  of 
Saint  Cloud  to  Versailles,  or  through  the  sub- 
urbs of  Rueil  and  Le  Vesinet  to  the  forest  of 
Saint  Germain. 

These  miraculous  escapes  from  the  toils  of  a 
great  city  give  one  a  clearer  impression  of  the 
breadth  with  which  it  is  planned,  and  of  the 
civic  order  and  elegance  pervading  its  whole 
system ;  yet  for  that  very  reason  there  is  perhaps 
more  interest  in  a  slow  progress  through  one  of 

[172] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

the  great  industrial  quarters  such  as  must  be 
crossed  to  reach  the  country  lying  to  the  north- 
east of  Paris. 

To  start  on  a  bright  spring  morning  from  the 
Place  du  Palais  Bourbon,  and  follow  the  tide  of 
traffic  along  the  quays  of  the  left  bank,  passing 
the  splendid  masses  of  the  Louvre  and  Notre 
Dame,  the  Conciergerie  and  the  Sainte  Cha- 
pelle;  to  skirt  the  blossoming  borders  of  the 
Jardin  des  Plantes,  and  cross  the  Seine  at  the 
Pont  d'Austerlitz,  getting  a  long  glimpse  down 
its  silver  reaches  till  they  divide  to  envelope  the 
Cite;  and  then  to  enter  by  the  Boulevard  Dide- 
rot on  the  long  stretch  of  the  Avenue  Daumesnil, 
which  leads  straight  to  the  Porte  Doree  of  Vin- 
cennes — to  follow  this  route  at  the  leisurely  pace 
necessitated  by  the  dense  flow  of  traffic,  is  to  get 
a  memorable  idea  of  the  large  way  in  which 
Paris  deals  with  some  of  her  municipal  problems. 

The  Avenue  Daumesnil,  in  particular,  with  its 
interminable  warehouses  and  cheap  shops  and 
guinguettes,  would  anywhere  else  be  the  prey  of 
grime  and  sordidness,  Instead,  it  is  spacious, 
clean,  and  prosaic  only  by  contrast  to  the  elegance 
of  the  thoroughfares  preceding  it;  and  at  the  Porte 

[173] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

Doree  it  gives  one  over  to  the  charming  alleys 
of  a  park  as  well-tended  and  far  more  beautiful 
than  the  Bois  de  Boulogne — a  park  offering  the 
luxury  of  its  romantic  lawns  and  lakes  for  the 
sole  delectation  of  the  packed  industrial  quarters 
that  surround  it. 

The  woods  of  this  wonderful  Bois  de  Vin- 
cennes  are  real  woods,  full  of  blue-bells  and 
lilies  of  the  valley;  and  as  one  flies  through  them 
in  the  freshness  of  the  May  morning,  Paris  seems 
already  far  behind,  a  mere  fading  streak  of 
factory-smoke  on  the  horizon.  One  loses  all 
thought  of  it  when,  beyond  Vincennes,  the 
road  crosses  the  Marne  at  Joinville-sur-Pont. 
Thence  it  passes  through  a  succession  of  bright 
semi-suburban  villages,  with  glimpses,  here  and 
there,  of  low  white  chateaux  or  of  little  grey 
churches  behind  rows  of  clipped  horn-beam; 
climbing  at  length  into  an  open  hilly  country, 
through  which  it  follows  the  windings  of  the 
Marne  to  Meaux. 

Bossuet's  diocesan  seat  is  a  town  of  somewhat 
dull  exterior,  with  a  Gothic  cathedral  which  has 
suffered  cruelly  at  the  hands  of  the  reformers; 
for,  by  an  odd  turn  of  fate,  before  becoming  the 

[174] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

eyrie  of  the  "Eagle,"  it  was  one  of  the  principal 
centres  of  Huguenot  activity — an  activity  de- 
plorably commemorated  in  the  ravaged  exterior 
of  the  church. 

From  Meaux  to  Rheims  the  country  grows  in 
charm,  with  a  slightly  English  quality  in  its  roll- 
ing spaces  and  rounded  clumps  of  trees;  but 
nothing  could  be  more  un-English  than  the 
grey-white  villages,  than  the  stony  squares  bor- 
dered by  clipped  horn-beams,  the  granite  market- 
crosses,  the  round-apsed  churches  with  their 
pointed  bell-towers. 

One  of  these  villages,  Braisne,  stands  out  in 
memory  by  virtue  of  its  very  unusual  church. 
This  tall  narrow  structure,  with  its  curious 
western  front,  so  oddly  buttressed  and  tapering, 
and  rising  alone  and  fragmentary  among  the  or- 
chards and  kitchen-gardens  of  a  silent  shrunken 
hamlet,  is  the  pathetic  survival  of  a  powerful 
abbey,  once  dominating  its  surroundings,  but 
now  existing  only  as  the  parish  church  of  the 
knot  of  sleepy  houses  about  it. 

A  stranger  and  less  explicable  vestige  of  the 
past  is  found  not  far  off  in  the  curious  walled 
village  of  Bazoches,  which,  though  lying  in  the 

[175] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

plain,  must  have  been  a  small  feudal  domain, 
since  it  still  shows  its  stout  mediaeval  defences 
and  half-fallen  gate-towers  tufted  with  wall- 
flowers and  wild  shrubs.  The  distinguishing 
fact  about  Bazoches  is  that  it  is  not  a  dwindled 
town,  with  desert  spaces  between  the  walls  and 
a  surviving  nucleus  of  houses :  its  girdle  of  stone 
fits  as  closely  as  a  finger-ring,  and  whatever  were 
its  past  glories  they  must  have  been  contained  in 
the  same  small  compass  that  suffices  it  to-day. 

Beyond  Braisne  the  country  is  less  hilly,  the 
pastures  are  replaced  by  vineyards,  and  the  road 
runs  across  a  wide  plain  to  Rheims.  The  extent 
of  the  town,  and  its  modern  manufacturing  out- 
skirts, make  its  distant  silhouette  less  character- 
istic than  that  of  Bourges  or  Chartres,  which  are 
still  so  subordinated  to  the  central  mass  of  their 
cathedrals.  At  Rheims  the  cathedral  comes  on 
one  unexpectedly,  in  the  centre  of  the  town;  but 
once  seen  it  enters  into  the  imagination,  less 
startlingly  but  perhaps  more  completely,  more 
pervasively,  than  any  other  of  the  great  Gothic 
monuments  of  France.  This  sense  of  being 
possessed  by  it,  subdued  to  it,  is  perhaps  partly 
due — at  least  in  the  case  of  the  simple  tourist — 

[176] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

to  the  happy,  the  unparalleled  fact,  that  the 
inn  at  Rheims  stands  immediately  opposite  the 
cathedral — so  that,  admitted  at  once  to  full 
communion  with  its  incomparable  west  front, 
one  returns,  after  each  excursion,  to  renew  and 
deepen  the  relation,  to  become  reabsorbed  in  it 
without  any  conscious  effort  of  attention. 

There  are  two  ways  of  feeling  those  arts — 
such  as  sculpture,  painting  and  architecture — 
which  appeal  first  to  the  eye:  the  technical,  and 
what  must  perhaps  be  called  the  sentimental 
way.  The  specialist  does  not  recognise  the  va- 
lidity of  the  latter  criterion,  and  derision  is  always 
busy  with  the  uncritical  judgments  of  those  who 
have  ventured  to  interpret  in  terms  of  another  art 
the  great  plastic  achievements.  The  man,  in 
short,  who  measures  the  beauty  of  a  cathedral  not 
by  its  structural  detail  consciously  analysed,  but  by 
its  total  effect  in  indirectly  stimulating  his  sen- 
sations, in  setting  up  a  movement  of  associated 
ideas,  is  classed — and  who  shall  say  unjustly  ? — 
as  no  better  than  the  reader  who  should  pretend 
to  rejoice  in  the  music  of  Lycidas  without  under- 
standing the  meaning  of  its  words.  There  is 
hardly  a  way  of  controverting  the  axiom  that 

1J177] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

thought  and  its  formulation  are  indivisible,  or  the 
deduction  that,  therefore,  the  only  critic  capable 
of  appreciating  the  beauty  of  a  great  work  of 
architecture  is  he  who  can  resolve  it  into  its  com- 
ponent parts,  understand  the  relation  they  bear  to 
each  other,  and  not  only  reconstruct  them  men- 
tally, but  conceive  of  them  in  a  different  relation, 
and  visualise  the  total  result  of  such  modifications. 
Assuredly — yet  in  those  arts  that  lie  between 
the  bounds  of  thought  and  sense,  and  leaning 
distinctly  toward  the  latter,  is  there  not  room 
for  another,  a  lesser  yet  legitimate  order  of  appre- 
ciation— for  the  kind  of  confused  atavistic  en- 
joyment that  is  made  up  of  historical  association, 
of  a  sense  of  mass  and  harmony,  of  the  relation 
of  the  building  to  the  sky  above  it,  to  the  lights 
and  shadows  it  creates  about  it — deeper  than 
all,  of  a  blind  sense  in  the  blood  of  its  old  racial 
power,  the  things  it  meant  to  far-off  minds  of 
which  ours  are  the  oft-dissolved  and  reconsti- 
tuted fragments  ?  Such  enjoyment,  to  be  of  any 
value  even  to  the  mind  that  feels  it,  must  be 
based  indeed  on  an  approximate  acquaintance 
with  the  conditions  producing  the  building,  the 
structural  theories  that  led  up  to  it,  their  mean- 

[  178] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

ing,  their  evolution,  their  relation  to  the  moral  and 
mental  growth  of  the  builders — indeed,  it  may 
be  affirmed  that  this  amount  of  familiarity  with 
the  past  is  necessary  to  any  genuine  aesthetic 
enjoyment.  But  even  this  leaves  the  enjoyment 
under  the  slur  of  being  merely  "amateurish," 
and  therefore  in  need  of  a  somewhat  courageous 
defence  by  those  who,  unequipped  for  technical 
verdicts,  have  yet  found  a  more  than  transient 
satisfaction  in  impressions  of  this  mixed  and 
nebulous  order. 

Such  a  defence  is  furnished,  to  a  degree  else- 
where unmatched,  by  the  exceptional  closeness 
of  intercourse  to  which  propinquity  admits  the 
traveller  at  Rheims.  Here  is  the  great  Presence 
on  one's  threshold — in  one's  window:  surprised 
at  dawn  in  the  mystery  of  its  re-birth  from  dark- 
ness; contemplated  at  midday  in  the  distinct- 
ness of  its  accumulated  detail,  its  complex  ritual 
of  stone ;  absorbed  into  the  mind,  into  the  heart, 
again  at  darkness — felt  lastly  and  most  deeply 
under  the  midnight  sky,  as  a  mystery  of  har- 
mony and  order  no  less  secret  and  majestic  than 
the  curves  of  the  stars  in  their  orbits. 

Such  pleasures,  at  any  rate,  whatever  their 
[179] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

value  as  contributions  to  special  lines  of  knowl- 
edge, enrich  the  aesthetic  consciousness,  prepare 
it  for  fresh  and  perhaps  more  definite  impres- 
sions, enlarge  its  sense  of  the  underlying  relation 
between  art  and  life,  between  all  the  manifold 
and  contradictory  expressions  of  human  energy, 
and  leave  it  thus  more  prepared  to  defend  its  own 
attitude,  to  see  how,  in  one  sense — a  sense  not 
excluding,  but  in  a  way  enveloping  and  fertilising 
all  the  specialised  forms  of  technical  competence 
— Gefuhl  ist  alles. 

It  is  one  of  the  wonders  of  this  rich  north- 
eastern district  that  the  traveller  may  pass,  in  a 
few  hours,  and  through  a  region  full  of  minor 
interest,  to  another  great  manifestation  of  medi- 
aeval strength :  the  fortress  of  Coucy.  Two  such 
contrasting  specimens  of  the  vigour — individual 
and  collective — of  that  tremendous  age  are 
hardly  elsewhere,  in  France,  to  be  found  in  such 
close  neighbourhood ;  and  it  adds  to  the  interest 
of  both  to  know  that  Coucy  was  a  fief  of  Rheims, 
bestowed  by  its  Archbishop  on  a  knight  who 
had  distinguished  himself  in  the  First  Crusade. 
It  was  a  great-grandson  of  this  Enguerrand  de 

IJ180] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

Boves  who  built  the  central  keep  and  the  walls; 
but  the  castle  was  farther  enlarged  and  adorned 
when,  at  the  beginning  of  the  fifteenth  century, 
it  passed  into  the  possession  of  Louis  d'Orleans, 
the  brother  of  Charles  VI. 

It  is  doubly  interesting  to  see  Coucy  after 
Carcassonne,  because  the  two  fortresses  present 
the  opposite  extremes  of  feudal  secular  archi- 
tecture, Carcassonne  being  the  chief  surviving 
example  of  a  large  walled  town  with  a  compara- 
tively small  central  castle,  while  at  Coucy  the 
castle  is  the  predominating  feature,  both  in  size 
and  site,  and  the  town  no  more  than  a  handful 
of  houses  within  the  outer  circuit  of  its  defences. 
Both  strongholds  are  of  course  situated  on  steep 
heights,  and  that  of  Coucy,  though  it  rises  from 
slopes  clad  in  foliage,  and  therefore  less  stern  of 
outline  than  the  dry  southern  rock  of  Carcas- 
sonne, stands  no  less  superbly  than  its  rival.  In 
fact  there  is  perhaps  no  single  point  from  which 
Carcassonne  produces  quite  such  an  effect  of 
concentrated  power  as  the  keep  and  castle-towers 
of  Coucy  squaring  themselves  on  their  western 
ridge.  Yet  such  comparisons  are  unprofitable, 
because  the  two  fortresses  were  designed  for  pur- 

[181] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

poses  so  different,  and  under  such  different  con- 
ditions, that  the  one  is  necessarily  most  vigorous 
where  the  other  had  the  least  need  for  a  display 
of  strength. 

Coucy,  in  its  present  fallen  state,  gains  incal- 
culably from  the  charm  of  its  surroundings — the 
lovely  country  enfolding  it  in  woods  and  streams, 
the  shaded  walks  beneath  its  ivy-hung  ramparts, 
and  above  all  the  distinct  and  exquisite  physiog- 
nomy of  the  tiny  old  town  which  these  ramparts 
enclose.  The  contrast  between  the  humble  yet 
stout  old  stone  houses  ranged,  as  it  were,  below 
the  salt,  and  the  castle  throned  on  its  dais  of 
rock  at  one  end  of  the  enclosure,  seems  to  sum 
up  the  whole  social  system  of  the  Middle  Ages 
as  luminously  and  concisely  as  Taine's  famous 
category.  Coucy  has  the  extraordinary  archaeo- 
logical value  of  a  place  that  has  never  outgrown 
the  special  institutions  producing  it:  the  hands 
of  the  clock  have  stopped  at  the  most  character- 
istic moment  of  its  existence;  and  so  impressive, 
even  to  the  unhistorical  mind,  is  its  compact  and 
vivid  "  exteriorisation "  of  a  great  phase  of  his- 
tory, that  one  wonders  and  shudders  at,  and 
finally  almost  comes  to  admire,  the  superhuman 

[182] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

stolidity  of  the  successful  merchant  who  has 
planted,  on  the  same  ledge  as  the  castle,  and 
almost  parallel  with  its  Titanic  towers,  a  neatly 
turreted  suburban  villa,  the  sole  attempt  of  mod- 
ern Coucy  to  give  the  retort  to  its  overwhelming 
past. 

Taking  Coucy  as  a  centre,  the  traveller  may, 
within  a  few  hours,  extraordinarily  vary  his  im- 
pressions, since  the  remarkable  group  of  monu- 
ments distributed  over  the  triangular  bit  of 
France  between  Paris,  Rheims  and  Saint  Quen- 
tin,  comprises  a  characteristic  example  of  almost 
every  architectural  period  from  the  early  Middle 
Ages  till  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century — the 
extremes  being  sometimes  in  as  close  touch  as 
Tracy-le-Val  and  Premontre. 

Turning  first  to  the  west,  through  a  country 
of  rolling  fields  and  wooded  heights,  vaguely 
English  in  its  freedom  from  the  devouring  agri- 
culture of  the  centre,  one  comes  on  the  most 
English  impression  in  France — the  towers  of 
Noyon  rising  above  a  girdle  of  orchards  and 
meadows.  Noyon,  indeed,  to  the  end,  main- 
tains in  one  this  illusion — so  softly  misted  with 

[183] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

verdure,  so  lacking  in  the  sharp  edges  of  the  dry 
stony  French  town,  it  seems,  by  its  old  street- 
architecture  of  cross-beams  and  stucco,  by  the 
smoothly  turfed  setting  of  the  cathedral,  and  the 
crowning  surprise  of  a  genuine  "close"  at  its 
back,  to  corroborate  at  every  step  the  explorer's 
first  impression. 

In  the  cathedral,  indeed,  one  is  no  longer  in 
England — though  still  without  being  very  defi- 
nitely in  France.  For  the  interior  of  Noyon, 
built  at  a  time  when  northern  art  was  still  grop- 
ing for  its  specific  expression,  is  a  thing  apart  in 
cathedral  architecture,  one  of  those  fortunate 
variations  from  which,  in  the  world  of  art  as  of 
nature,  new  forms  are  sometimes  developed. 
That  in  this  case  the  variation  remained  sterile, 
while  it  makes,  no  doubt,  for  a  more  exclusive 
enjoyment  of  Noyon,  leaves  one  conjecturing  on 
the  failure  to  transmit  itself  of  so  original  and 
successful  an  experiment.  The  deviation  con- 
sists, principally,  in  the  fact  that  the  transept 
ends  of  Noyon  are  rounded,  so  that  they  form, 
in  conjunction  with  the  choir,  a  kind  of  apsidal 
trefoil  of  the  most  studied  and  consummate 
grace.     The  instinctive  use  of  the  word  grace 

[184] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

perhaps  explains  as  well  as  anything  the  failure 
of  Noyon  to  repeat  itself  (save  once,  half-heart- 
edly, in  the  south  transept  of  Soissons).  Grace 
at  the  expense  of  strength  is,  especially  from 
without,  the  total  result  of  this  unique  blending 
of  curves,  this  prodigal  repetition  of  an  effect 
that,  to  produce  its  deepest  impression,  should 
be  used  singly,  and  only  as  the  culmination,  the 
ecstatic  flowering,  of  a  vigorous  assemblage  of 
straight  lines. 

But  within  the  church,  and  especially  from 
the  point  where  the  sweep  of  both  transepts  may 
be  seen  flowing  into  the  curves  of  the  choir,  one 
is  too  deeply  penetrated  by  the  grace  to  feel  in  it 
any  latent  weakness.  For  pure  loveliness  of  line 
nothing  in  northern  church  architecture — not 
even  the  long  bold  sweep  of  Canterbury  choir — 
surpasses  the  complex  pattern  of  the  east  end 
of  Noyon.  And  in  the  detail  of  the  interior  con- 
struction the  free,  almost  careless,  mingling  of  the 
round  and  the  pointed  arch  heightens  the  effect 
of  Noyon  as  of  something  experimental,  fugitive, 
not  to  come  again — the  blue  flower,  as  it  were, 
of  the  Gothic  garden — an  experiment  which 
seems  to  express  the  fantasy  of  a  single  mind 

[185] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

rather  than  such  collective  endeavour  as  brought 
forth  the  great  secular  churches  of  the  Middle 
Ages. 

While  Noyon  offers,  in  its  general  setting,  and 
in  certain  architectural  peculiarities,  suggestions 
so  specifically  English,  the  type  of  its  chief  civic 
monument  seems  drawn  from  that  Burgundian 
region  where  the  passing  of  Gothic  into  Renais- 
sance forms  found  so  rich  and  picturesque  an 
expression.  The  Hotel  de  Ville  of  Noyon,  built  in 
the  middle  of  the  fifteenth  century,  is  a  charming 
product  of  that  transitional  moment  which  was 
at  its  best  in  the  treatment  of  municipal  buildings, 
since  domestic  architecture  was  still  cramped, 
and  driven  to  an  overcrowding  of  detail,  by  the 
lingering  habit  of  semi-defensive  construction. 
In  the  creation  of  the  town-hall  the  new  art 
could  throw  off  feudal  restraints,  and  the  archi- 
tect of  the  graceful,  ornate  yet  sober  building  at 
Noyon — with  its  two  facades  so  equally  "com- 
posed" as  wholes,  so  lingered  over  and  caressed 
in  every  part — has  united  all  the  freedom  of  the 
new  spirit  with  the  patient  care  for  detail  that 
marked  the  old. 

At  Saint  Quentin,  not  far  to  the  north-west  of 
[186] 


X 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

Noyon,  a  town-hall  of  more  imposing  dimensions 
suggests  other  architectural  affinities.  This 
part  of  France  is  close  to  the  Low  Countries, 
and  Flemish  influences  have  overflowed  the 
borders.  The  late  Gothic  Hotel  de  Ville  at  Saint 
Quentin,  with  its  elaborately  composed  facade 
surmounted  by  three  pointed  gables,  was  com- 
pleted at  a  period  when,  in  other  parts  of  France, 
Renaissance  forms  were  rapidly  superseding  the 
earlier  style.  But  here  the  Gothic  lingers,  as  it 
did  in  the  Low  Countries,  in  a  rich  yet  sober  and 
sturdy  form  of  civic  architecture  which  suits  the 
moist  grey  skies,  the  flat  fields,  the  absence  of 
any  abrupt  or  delicate  lines  in  the  landscape. 
Saint  Quentin,  a  large  dull  manufacturing  town, 
with  a  nucleus  of  picturesque  buildings  grouped 
about  its  town-hall  and  its  deplorably  renovated 
collegiate  church,  has  a  tone  so  distinctively 
northern  and  provincial,  that  its  other  distin- 
guishing possession — the  collection  of  portraits 
by  the  great  pastelliste  Latour — seems  almost  as 
much  expatriated  as  though  it  were  actually  be- 
yond the  frontier.  It  is  difficult  to  conceive  of  the 
most  expert  interpreter  of  the  Parisian  face  as 
forming  his  style  on  physiognomies  observed  in 

[187] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

the  sleepy  streets  and  along  the  sluggish  canals  of 
Saint  Quentin;  and  the  return  of  his  pictures  to 
his  birthplace,  if  it  has  a  certain  historical  fit- 
ness, somehow  suggests  a  violent  psychological 
dislocation,  and  makes  one  regard  the  vivid 
countenances  lining  the  walls  of  the  Muse*e 
Lecuyer  as  those  of  emigres  yearning  to  be  back 
across  the  border.  For  Latour  worked  in  the 
Attic  age  when  the  least  remoteness  from  Paris 
was  exile;  and  one  may  reasonably  fancy  the 
unmistakable  likeness  between  all  his  sitters  to 
be  the  result  of  the  strong  centralising  pressure 
which  left  the  French  face  no  choice  between 
Parisianism  and  barbarism. 

One's  first  impression  on  entering  this  singu- 
lar portrait  gallery  is  of  coming  into  a  salon 
where  all  the  habitues  have  taken  the  same  tone, 
where  the  angles  of  difference  have  been  so 
rubbed  down  that  personalities  are  as  hard  to 
differentiate  as  in  a  group  of  Orientals.  The 
connecting  link  which  unites  a  company  ranging 
from  Vernezobre,  the  colour-dealer,  to  Madame 
la  Dauphine,  from  the  buffoon  Manelli  to  the 
Academician  Duclos — this  unifying  trait  is  found 
in  the  fixed  smile  on  the  lips  of  all  the  sitters.    It 

[188] 


ST.  QUENTIN:     HOTEL  DEVILLE 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

is  curious,  and  a  little  disconcerting,  on  first  en- 
tering, to  see  faces  of  such  marked  individuality 
— from  the  rough  unshorn  Vernezobre  to  the 
mincing  Camargo — overrun  by  the  same  simper 
of  "good  company" — so  disconcerting  that  only 
by  eliminating  the  universal  Cupid's-bow  mouth, 
and  trying  to  see  the  other  features  without  it, 
can  one  do  justice  to  the  vigorous  and  penetrat- 
ing portraiture  of  Latour.  Then  indeed  the 
pictures  affirm  themselves  as  "documents,"  and 
the  artist's  technical  skill  in  varying  his  methods 
with  the  type  of  his  sitters  becomes  only  less 
interesting  than  the  psychological  insight  of 
which,  after  all,  it  is  a  partial  expression.  One's 
attention  is  at  first  absorbed  by  the  high  personal 
interest  of  the  protraits;  but  when  this  has  been 
allowed  for,  the  general  conclusion  resulting 
from  their  collective  study  is  that,  even  in  that 
day  of  feminine  ascendancy,  the  man's  face,  not 
only  plastically  but  psychologically,  was  a  far 
finer  "subject"  than  the  woman's.  Latour  had 
before  his  easel  some  of  the  most  distinguished 
examples  of  both;  and  how  the  men  triumph 
and  stand  out,  how  Rousseau  and  d'Alembert, 
Maurice  de  Saxe  and  the  matchless  Vernezobre 

[189] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

overshadow  and  efface  all  the  Camargos  and 
Dauphinesses,  the  Favarts  and  Pompadours  of 
the  varied  feminine  assortment!  Only  one  little 
ghostly  nameless  creature — a  model,  a  dancer, 
the  catalogue  uncertainly  conjectures — detaches 
herself  from  the  polite  assemblage  as  if  impaled 
with  quivering  wings  on  the  sharp  pencil  of  the 
portraitist.  One  wonders  if  she  knew  she  had 
been  caught.  .  .  . 

The  short  run  from  Saint  Quentin  to  Laon 
carries  one,  through  charming  scenery,  from  the 
Low  Countries  into  a  region  distinctively  French, 
but  with  such  a  touch  of  romance  as  Turner  saw 
in  the  sober  French  landscape  when  he  did  his 
"Rivers  and  Harbours."  Laon,  the  great  cathe- 
dral town  of  the  north-east,  is  not  seated  on 
a  river;  but  the  ridge  that  carries  it  rises  so 
abruptly  from  the  plain,  and  so  simulates  the 
enclosing  curves  of  a  bay,  that,  as  we  approached 
it,  the  silvery  light  on  the  spring  fields  at  its  base 
seemed  like  the  shimmer  of  water. 

Seen  from  the  road  to  Saint  Quentin,  Laon  is 
one  of  the  stateliest  hill-towns  of  France — in- 
deed it  suggests  rivalry  with  the  high-perched 

[190] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

Umbrian  cities  rather  than  with  any  nearer 
neighbours.  At  one  extremity  of  the  strangely 
hooked  cliff,  the  two  ends  of  which  bend  toward 
each  other  like  a  thumb  and  forefinger,  stands 
the  ruined  abbey  church  of  Saint  Vincent,  now 
a  part  of  the  arsenal ;  at  the  other  rises  the  cita- 
del, behind  which  are  grouped  the  cathedral  and 
episcopal  palace;  and  the  apex  of  the  triangle, 
between  these  pronged  extremities,  is  occupied 
by  the  church  of  Saint  Martin,  which  lifts  its 
Romanesque  towers  above  the  remains  of  a 
Premonstratensian  abbey.  In  the  sheltered  hol- 
low enclosed  between  the  thumb  and  forefinger 
lies  the  Cuve  de  Saint  Vincent,  a  garden  district  of 
extraordinary  fertility,  and  beyond  it  the  inter- 
minable plain  flows  away  toward  the  Belgian 
frontier. 

To  the  advantage  of  this  site  Laon  adds 
the  possession  of  well-preserved  ramparts,  of 
two  or  three  fortified  gates  to  which  clusters  of 
old  houses  have  ingeniously  attached  themselves, 
and  above  all  of  its  seven-towered  cathedral — a 
cathedral  now  no  longer,  though  its  apse  still 
adjoins  an  ancient  group  of  diocesan  buildings, 
from  the  cloistered  court  of  which  one  obtains 

[191] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

the  finest  impression  of  the  lateral  mass  of  the 
monument. 

Notre  Dame  of  Laon  ranks  in  size  among  the 
"secondary"  French  cathedrals;  but  both  in 
composition  and  in  detail  it  occupies  a  place  in 
architecture  as  distinctive  as  its  natural  setting, 
and  perhaps  no  higher  praise  can  be  awarded  it 
than  to  say  that,  like  the  church  of  Vezelay,  it  is 
worthy  of  the  site  it  occupies. 

The  seven  towers  of  Laon  are  its  most  notable 
ornament;  no  other  cathedral  roof  of  France 
bears  such  a  glorious  crown.  Four  only  of  the 
towers  have  received  their  upper  tiers  of  ar- 
cades ;  but  the  others  rise  high  enough  above  the 
roof-ridge  to  break  its  outline  with  their  massive 
buttresses  and  pyramidal  capping.  The  taller 
four  are  distinguished  by  the  originality  of  their 
upper  stories,  of  which  the  intermediate  one  is 
octagonal,  and  broken  up  into  four  groups  of 
arches  of  extreme  lightness  and  vigour,  separated 
by  stilted  round-arched  openings  which  are  car- 
ried through  to  the  upper  tier  of  the  tower.  At 
the  west  end  of  the  church,  the  open  niches 
formed  by  the  octagonal  sally  of  the  tower- 
arcades  are  filled  by  colossal  stone  oxen,  modelled 

[192] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

with  a  bold  realism,  and  advancing  from  their 
high-perched  stalls  almost  as  triumphantly  as  the 
brazen  horses  above  the  door  of  Saint  Mark's. 

These  effigies  are  supposed  to  commemorate 
the  services  of  the  patient  beasts  who  dragged  the 
stone  for  the  cathedral  up  the  cruel  hill  of  Laon; 
and  looking  up  at  their  silhouettes,  projected 
ponderously  against  the  blue,  one  is  inclined  to 
see  in  them  a  symbol  of  mediaeval  church-build- 
ing— of  the  moral  and  material  cost  at  which 
Christianity  reared  its  monuments. 

The  oxen  of  Laon  and  the  angels  of  Saint 
Pere  sous  Vezelay  might  indeed  be  said  to  stand 
for  the  two  chief  factors  in  this  unparalleled 
outburst  of  religious  activity — the  visionary  pas- 
sion that  aroused  it,  and  the  painful  expenditure 
of  human  and  animal  labour  that  made  the 
vision  a  reality.  When  one  reads  of  the  rapidity 
with  which  many  of  these  prodigious  works  were 
executed,  of  the  fever  of  devotion  that  flamed  in 
whole  communities,  one  has,  under  the  gladness 
and  exaltation,  glimpses  of  a  drudgery  as  un- 
ceasing and  inconceivable  as  that  of  the  pyramid- 
builders,  and  out  of  which,  perhaps,  have  grown 
the  more  vigorous,  the  stabler  fibres  of  European 

[193] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

character — and  one  feels  that  the  triumphing 
oxen  of  Laon,  though  they  stand  for  so  vast  a 
sum  of  dull,  unrewarded,  unintelligible  toil,  have 
on  the  whole  done  more  for  civilisation  than  the 
angels  of  Saint  Pere. 

At  Soissons,  an  old  city  saturated  with  Roman 
and  Merovingian  memories,  Gothic  art  again 
triumphs,  but  in  a  different  and  a  milder  strain. 

The  short  run  from  Laon  to  Soissons,  through 
a  gently  undulating  landscape,  prepares  one  for 
these  softer  impressions.  The  Gallo-Roman  city 
has  neither  the  proud  site  nor  the  defensive  out- 
line of  Laon.  It  lies  in  the  valley  of  the  Aisne, 
in  a  circle  of  wooded  hills,  with  the  river  winding 
peaceably  between  the  old  town  and  its  fau- 
bourg of  Saint  Vaast.  Passing  through  this  fau- 
bourg, and  crossing  the  Aisne,  one  is  caught  in 
a  maze  of  narrow  streets,  which  lead  up  tor- 
tuously to  the  cathedral  square.  The  pressure 
of  surrounding  houses  makes  it  difficult  to  get 
a  comprehensive  view  of  the  church,  but  one 
receives,  in  narrow  glimpses  through  the  clipped 
limes  of  the  market-place,  a  general  impression 
of  grace  and  sobriety  that  somehow  precludes 

[194] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

any  strong  individual  effect.  The  cathedral  of 
Soissons  is  indeed  chiefly  remarkable  for  its 
repetition  of  the  rounded  transepts  of  Noyon; 
though  in  this  case  (for  reasons  which  it  would 
be  interesting  to  learn)  the  round  end,  while 
receiving  the  farther  development  of  an  aisle  and 
triforium,  has  been  applied  only  to  one  transept. 
The  thought  of  Soissons,  however,  at  least  in 
the  mind  of  the  passing  impressionist,  must  re- 
main chiefly  associated  with  that  rarest  creation 
of  the  late  Gothic  of  the  north-east,  the  facade 
of  Saint  Jean  des  Vignes.  This  church,  which 
formed  part  of  a  monastic  settlement  in  the  out- 
skirts of  the  town,  is  now  almost  in  ruins,  and  of 
the  abbatial  buildings  around  it  there  remain 
only  two  admirable  fragments  of  the  cloister 
arcade,  and  the  abbot's  house,  built  at  a  much 
later  date.  So  complete  is  the  outline  of  the  beau- 
tiful west  front  that  one  would  hardly  guess  the 
ruin  of  the  nave  but  for  the  blue  sky  showing 
through  the  vast  circle  of  the  central  rose,  from 
which  every  fragment  of  tracery  has  been 
stripped.  Yet  one  can  pardon  even  that  inhu- 
manity to  the  destroyers  who  respected  the  tow- 
ers— those  incomparable  towers,  so  harmonious 

[195] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

in  their  divergences,  so  typical  of  that  lost  secret 
of  mediaeval  art — the  preservation  of  symmetry 
in  unlikeness.  These  western  towers  of  Saint 
Jean,  rising  strongly  on  each  side  of  the  central 
door,  and  reinforcing  the  airy  elegance  of  the 
facade  by  their  vigorous  vertical  buttressing, 
break,  at  the  level  of  the  upper  gable,  into  pyram- 
idal masses  of  differing  height  and  breadth, 
one  more  boldly  tapering,  the  other  more  mas- 
sive and  complex,  yet  preserving  in  a  few  essen- 
tial features — the  placing  of  the  openings,  the 
correspondence  of  strong  horizontal  lines — a 
unity  that  dominates  their  differences  and  binds 
them  into  harmony  with  the  whole  facade.  It 
is  sad,  on  passing  through  the  gaping  western 
doorway,  to  find  one's  self  on  a  bit  of  waste 
ground  strewn  with  fragments  of  sculpture  and 
masonry — sadder  still  to  have  the  desolation 
emphasized  by  coming  here  on  a  bit  of  Gothic 
cloister,  there  on  a  still  more  distinctive  speci- 
men of  Renaissance  arcading.  The  quality  of 
these  surviving  fragments  indicates  how  great 
must  have  been  the  interest,  both  aesthetic  and 
historical,  of  this  beautiful  ruin,  and  revives  the 
vain  wish  that,  in  some  remote  corner  of  Europe, 

[196] 


SOISSONS:     RUINED  CHURCH  OF  SAINT-JEAN-DES-VIQNES 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

invasion  and  civil  war  might  have  spared  at  least 
one  complete  example  of  a  great  monastic  col- 
ony, enabling  one  to  visualise  the  humaner  side 
of  that  mediaeval  life  which  Carcassonne  evokes 
in  its  militant  aspect. 

The  return  from  Soissons  to  Paris  holds  out  so 
many  delightful  alternatives,  in  respect  both  of 
scenery  and  architecture,  that,  in  April  especially, 
the  traveller  may  be  excused  for  wavering  be- 
tween Compie*gne  and  Senlis,  between  Beauvais 
and  Saint  Leu  d'Esserent.  Perhaps  the  road 
which  traverses  Senlis  and  Saint  Leu,  just  be- 
cause it  offers  less  exceptional  impressions, 
brings  one  closer  to  the  heart  of  old  France,  to 
its  inexhaustible  store  of  sober  and  familiar 
beauty.  Senlis,  for  instance,  is  only  a  small 
sleepy  town,  with  two  or  three  churches  of  minor 
interest — with  that  the  guide-book  might  dismiss 
it;  but  had  there  been  anything  in  all  our  wan- 
derings quite  comparable  to  the  impression  pro- 
duced by  that  little  cathedral  in  its  quiet  square 
— a  monument  so  compact  yet  noble,  so  em- 
broidered with  delicate  detail,  above  all  so 
sunned-over   with   a   wonderful   golden   lichen 

[197] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

that  it  seems  like  a  dim  old  jewel-casket  from 
which  the  gilding  is  almost  worn  ? 

The  other  churches  of  Senlis,  enclosed,  like 
the  cathedral,  in  the  circuit  of  half-ruined  walls 
that  make  a  miniature  cite  of  the  inner  town, 
have  something  of  the  exquisite  quality  of  its 
central  monument.  Both,  as  it  happens,  have 
been  secularised,  and  Saint  Pierre,  the  later  and 
more  ornate  of  the  two  buildings,  has  suffered 
the  irony  of  being  converted  into  a  market,  while 
Saint  Frambourg,  an  ancient  collegiate  church, 
has  sunk  to  the  uses  of  a  storage  warehouse.  In 
each  case,  access  to  the  interior  is  sometimes 
hard  to  obtain;  but  the  two  facades,  one  so  deli- 
cate in  its  early  Gothic  reticence,  the  other  so 
prodigal  of  the  last  graces  of  the  style,  carry  on 
almost  unbrokenly  the  architectural  chronicle 
which  begins  with  the  Romanesque  cathedral; 
and  the  neglect,  so  painful  to  witness  in  the  in- 
terior, has  given  them  a  surface-tone  almost  rich 
enough  to  atone  for  the  cost  at  which  it  has  been 
acquired. 

If,  on  leaving  Senlis,  one  turns  westward, 
skirting  the  wooded  glades  of  Chantilly,  and 

[198] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

crossing  the  park  at  the  foot  of  the  "Canal  de 
la  Manche,"  one  comes  presently  into  the  valley 
of  the  Oise  and,  a  few  kilometres  farther  on,  the 
village  of  Saint  Leu  d'Esserent  lifts  its  terraced 
church  above  the  river. 

The  site  of  Saint  Leu  is  that  of  the  little 
peaked  Mediterranean  towns:  there  is  some- 
thing defensive,  defiant,  in  the  way  it  grasps  its 
hill-side  and  lifts  its  church  up  like  a  shield. 
The  town  owes  this  crowning  ornament — and 
doubtless  also  its  own  slender  existence — to  the 
founding  here,  in  the  eleventh  century,  of  a  great 
Cluniac  abbey,  of  which  certain  Romanesque 
arcades  and  a  fortified  gate  may  be  traced  among 
the  debris  behind  the  apse.  Of  the  original 
church  there  survives  only  a  round-arched  tower, 
to  which,  in  the  latter  half  of  the  twelfth  cent- 
ury, was  added  what  is  perhaps  the  most  ho- 
mogeneous, and  assuredly  the  most  beautiful, 
early  Gothic  structure  in  France.  The  peculiar 
interest  of  this  church  of  Saint  Leu — apart  from 
its  intrinsic  nobility  of  design — lies  in  the  fact  of 
its  being,  so  curiously,  the  counterpart,  the  other 
side  of  the  shield,  of  the  church  of  Vezelay.  For, 
as  at  Vezelay  one  felt  beneath  the  weight  of  the 

[199] 


A  MOTOR-FLIGHT  THROUGH  FRANCE 

round  openings  the  impatient  stirrings  of  the 
pointed  arch,  so  here  at  Saint  Leu,  where  the 
latter  form  at  last  triumphs,  its  soaring  move- 
ment is  still  held  down  by  the  close-knit  Roman- 
esque frame  of  the  church.  It  is  hard  to  define 
the  cause  of  this  impression,  since  at  Saint  Leu 
the  pointed  style  has  quite  freed  itself,  structur- 
ally, from  Romanesque  entraves,  all  the  chief 
elements  of  later  Gothic  construction  being  blent 
there  in  so  harmonious  a  composition  that,  as 
Mr.  Charles  Moore  has  pointed  out,  the  church 
might  stand  for  a  perfect  example  of  "un- 
adorned Gothic."  All  that  later  art  could  do 
toward  the  elaboration  of  such  a  style  was  to 
add  ornament,  enlarge  openings,  and  lighten  the 
masses.  But  by  the  doing  of  just  that,  the  im- 
mense static  value  of  the  earlier  proportions  was 
lost — and  the  distinction  of  Saint  Leu  is  that  it 
blends,  in  perfect  measure,  Gothic  lightness  with 
Romanesque  tenacity. 

Of  this  the  inside  of  the  church  is  no  less  illus- 
trative than  its  exterior.  Though  the  western 
bays  of  the  nave  were  built  later  than  its  eastern 
portion,  they  end  in  a  narthex  on  the  lines  of 
the  outer  porch  of  Ve*zelay,  surmounted  by  a 

[200] 


A  FLIGHT  TO  THE  NORTH-EAST 

gallery  from  which  the  great  sweep  of  the  aisles 
and  triforium  may  be  felt  in  all  its  grandeur. 
For,  despite  the  moderate  proportions  of  the 
church,  grandeur  and  reserve  are  its  dominating 
qualities — within  and  without  it  has  attained  the 
classic  balance  that  great  art  at  all  times  has  its 
own  ways  of  reaching. 

Westward  from  Saint  Leu,  the  valley  of  the 
Oise,  fruitful  but  somewhat  shadeless,  winds  on 
toward  Paris  through  pleasant  riverside  towns — 
Beaumont,  l'lsle-Adam,  and  the  ancient  city  of 
Pontoise;  and  beyond  the  latter,  at  a  point 
where  the  river  flings  a  large  loop  to  the  west, 
one  may  turn  east  again  and,  crossing  the  forest 
of  Saint  Germain,  descend  on  Paris  through  the 
long  shadows  of  the  park  of  Saint  Cloud. 


[201] 


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